Association magazines and hybrid print-online solutions

by Anne Gentle

I’ve been assisting with a report for the Society for Technical Communication about social media for professional organizations. I’m also on an editorial advisory panel helping to shape the articles and authors for their Intercomm magazine, which is printed 10 times a year and has over 10,000 subscribers. Survey results show that members still want a printed magazine, but also value the speed and interaction that an online presence can provide. So, I’ve been trying to find good examples of association magazines that work well online also.

Building a brand, educating, or raising awareness?

I’m finding that association magazines are sometimes thought of as a branch of “brand” magazines. There’s a bit of controversy on this point though. I read this blog entry that asks, “Are association magazines just flashier custom pubs?” The author says “While some associations work with custom publishers to produce their magazines, the publications they create are not marketing-based vehicles for a particular brand. To use a custom publishing study to explain habits of association magazine readers seems like a stretch.”

I suppose “branding” isn’t quite the right term for what professional associations offer their members. Is it “raising awareness” instead?

I also found a reference to the Roper study that the blog entry above cites. The bullet points they choose to highlight are:

• 85% view custom publications as a preferred source of information because they provide targeted information
• 79% view companies that produces a custom magazine as believing in its product
• 69% after reading a custom magazine feel they know more about the company
• 65% view companies that produce a custom magazine as caring about its customers

The print to online spectrum

I subscribe to a great association magazine for an association called CHADD called Attention magazine. I appreciate their hybrid approach for print and online even though it’s a pretty simple implementation with PDF files secured behind a membership login. It’s not interactive, as in, there are no comments on articles that I can see. The site touts their recent (June 2008) award for redesign from the Society of National Association Publishers.

What’s also interesting to me is that there’s another magazine called ADDitude that does a great job of online engagement. It’s free for online content and a paid-subscriber magazine for printed content. It’s interesting that the market can bear two similar magazines, but there you go. It appears is a huge range of the amount of online and print offered.

One association magazine that is a great example of online engagement even after the printed magazine has been mailed is the Associations Now magazine from the ASAE (American Society of Association Executives). There’s an RSS feed so you can subscribe to updates to the magazine’s main page. You can rate an article or write a review of it, and bookmark or share it with others with an AddThis widget.

Looking at a brand name example

An interesting note, if you do want to correlate brand and custom pubs as being similar to association magazines, Adobe magazine had probably half a million subscribers but stopped doing print production (as far as I can tell) in 2000. Archives are still available online. Adobe is miles ahead in print-online hybridization, and apparently tried a 2.0 magazine, but isn’t offering it now.

There may be lessons learned in these examples. What are some of your favorite association magazines, and how much engagement is online?

What We’re Reading, Week of 10/12

From Acronym…
What have your members taught you?
A great way to wind down week! This post from Acronym reminds us that we should not only look at what we can DO for association members, but what we can LEARN from them.

From AFP Blog…
New Video Series Helps Exempt Organizations Understand Redesigned Form 990 Requirements
AFP posted a link to a helpful video for exempt organizations that explains recent changes to the Form 990.

From NTEN…
Blog Action Day 2009 Climate Change: Technology in the Climate Movement
NTEN and 9,427 other blogs from 150 countries with 12,896,974 readers are smashing the debate  about what impact the online world has on offline action with these numbers and think about the over 12 million people around the world who are raising their consciousness about climate change. NTEN posts some highlights.

What We’re Reading, Week of 10/5

From TechSoup…
Happy Birthday, TechSoup New Zealand!
TechSoup celebrates the anniversary of their New Zealand partners and their rapid growth.

From Kivi’s Nonprofit Communications Blog…
What Nonprofits Can Learn from Politico’s Success
Kivi takes an interesting look at the success of the Politico website and draws some interesting comparison.

From Acronym…
My Top 5 Things to Remember in 2010 as an Association Professional
Acronym takes a look to a new year and what it will take to be successful in 2010.

From A Small Change…
Eating Excellent Fundraising For Breakfast
Jason at A Small Change has some interesting and inspirational musings about the important of breakfast and successful fundraising.

What We’re Reading, Week of 9/28

From Beth’s Blog…
How LIVESTRONG Uses Social Media To Animate Its Community
Guest blogger Brooke McMillan contributes this insightful post to Beth’s Blog, taking a look at a few tips utilized by LIVESTRONG to ensure success in the use of social media.

From Acronym…
Purpose-driven membership
What is membership? This lengthy blog post at Acronym takes a look at this somewhat existential and lofty question with some interesting thoughts.

From A Small Change…
Results Oriented Fundraising
Jason at A small Change discusses a comment left by one of his readers to an earlier post about quantifying donations and support.

What We’re Reading, Week of 9/21

From A Small Change…
Musings on the Future of Fundraising
Jason at A Small Change writes about the changing landscape of fundraising and his predictions for the future.

From Beth’s Blog…
How to translate social listening into good twitter conversation that supports your objectives
Beth Kanter takes a look at how organization’s can better utilize social listening (the practice of using social networking sites to listen to their members and potential donors) and turn that into constructive communications via Twitter.

From Acronym…
How secure is that golden handcuff?
An interesting article about how organizations should approach at their “golden handcuff” (a program or product so important to a member that it effectively binds them to the organization).

From NTEN…
Online Donors: Why They Leave and How to Win Them Back
NTEN takes a look at an interesting problem and opportunity when it comes to online donors which they have dubbed “the young and the generous” (they tend to be under 40 and their gifts are around $100).

What We’re Reading, Week of 9/14

From NTEN…
IT Alignment Is Mission Alignment
An interesting article discussing ways in which IT departments can “realign” themselves to better ensure that they are well placed and helping to achieve a myriad of goals across the company.

From Beth’s Blog…
Dear Causes: Please Share Your Cause Exit Survey Data With Nonprofits
Beth Kanter takes a look at Facebook causes and a surprising feature that should prove useful to organizations who do outreach through causes.

From Acronym…
Why should members join?
Acronym from ASAE poses the questions for readers to sound off on, “Why should members join?” See what people have to say.

From The Chronicle of Philanthropy…
Followers and Friends Not the Only Measure of Nonprofit Success Online
Are non-profits using social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook successfully? This is the charge posed by marketer Seth Godin, though Peter Panepento (the author of the post) disagrees.

What We’re Reading, Week of 8/24

From A Small Change…
Building Community Online
This post from Jason at A Small Change blog takes a look at how organizations should go about building their online community by, in part, creating an intentional culture that fit the various cultures of your donors.

From Acronym…
Facebook fundraising: Feeding America shows good taste
Acronym from ASAE examines the effectiveness of one of the early adopters using Facebook for fundraising. To do this they look at Feeding America’s (formerly Second Harvest) latest campaign on Facebook, a “virtual Sandwich Swap n’ Share” involving the unusual duo of Hellmann’s and Best Foods Mayonnaise with musician Billy Ray Cyrus.

From Beth’s Blog…
Seven Thoughts on Slacktivism
This guest post by Ali Cherry of Beaconfire Consulting takes a look at the growing trend of “Slactivism”, the act of participating in obviously pointless activities as an expedient alternative to actually expending effort to fix a problem

From NTEN…
The Shrinking Generational Digital Divide
Sami Hassanyeh of AARP contributes this post looking at trends in demographics of the use of technology and where these are headed. Some of the findings about current usage demographics may surprise you (they did us)!

What We’re Reading, Week of 8/17

From AFP Blog…
Super Bowl of Conventions Under Way in Toronto
This post from AFP Blog talks about the American Society of Association Executives and the Center for Association Leadership’s annual meeting and exposition. Dubbed the “Super Bowl of conventions”.

From Acronym…
Living through short-term pain
A fantastic article looking at the speech made by Fareed Zakaria at the ASAE closing general session and one of his final points; that “we have got to learn to impose short-term pain for long-term gain.”

From Frogloop…
Online Video: Why I’m a Believer
Changing gears, this post from Frogloop is written by a video convert. Shirley Sexton discusses her initial hesitance at jumping on the video bandwagon and what changed her mind!

Social media strategy – where do you begin?

Social media has so many tools and web sites it’s overwhelming to know where to start. Atlanta-based social networking strategist David Nour has researched over 400 social networking tools at his consulting firm according to this Richmond Times-Dispatch article. 400! But there are probably three to five that would work well for your association. So where do you begin?

When I present about social media tools, I like to point out that there’s only one Three Letter Acronym in social media (that’s RSS, Really Simple Syndication, used for subscription notifications). But the most popular social media sites have some strange names, I must say. Twitter sounds funny if you say it three times fast. Facebook is two words put together, without using CamelCase. LinkedIn is another word combination that does use CamelCase. The site del.icio.us recently changed its name to delicious.com. Another site you haven’t yet heard of is probably lurking around the corner, right?

Overcoming intimidation

The word “lurking” evokes dark corners, the unknown, and scary scenes. I believe intimidation is part of the difficulty in getting started. I appreciated this line from Hammock Inc’s blog, Conversational Media. “It’s understandable that social media can be scary, but don’t let it prevent you from meeting your association goals.” Their blog post, How to Become Your Association’s Social Media Champion,  goes on to talk about becoming or finding an internal champion.

Listening first

I also encourage a listen-first attitude. “Listening” to social media means setting up Google Alerts for your association and searching for keywords that are important to your association’s goals. The notifications can be emailed to you periodically (daily or weekly). It can mean going to search.twitter.com and entering keywords or hashtags (pre-selected keywords or acronyms prefixed with a # sign), and then subscribing to the results of that real-time search.

Establishing goals

A reasonable approach is to step back one step and look at your overall content and communication strategy and the overarching goals your association has. Is it raising awareness of issues? Increasing connections to other members? Developing killer content for learning?

Analyzing constituents

In May 2009, the ASAE’s Associations Now magazine ran an interview titled “People First: The Key to Social Media Strategy” where David Nour does an excellent job of describing the 90-9-1 rule of engagement in any community event (or party, as his example shows.) This rule applies for mailing lists, wikis, online groups, and special interest groups. There’s a small core group of people, about one percent of the group, who will be very active in the group. Nine percent will contribute from time to time, but a full 90% will only read or observe but will never contribute.

The book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, authored by Forrester analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, has a Social Technographics tool available online that describes a ladder of participants in combination with their demographics. At the top of the ladder are Creators, those who write blogs, publish videos they’ve created, and so forth, might make up a large portion of your member’s demographics. But if many of your members are Inactives, those who do not participate at least monthly in the social networking and creation activities listed, like reading blogs, reviews, subscribing to feeds, you may want to reconsider whether your association’s goals can be met with the use of social media.

Running a small pilot project

If your analysis shows there is interest, activity, and goals to be met with social media, start small. You can use the learning experience to build out your strategy further.

Putting it all together

Beth Kanter, a consultant and trainer to non-profits about social media techniques, has a wonderful blog post about Creating Your Organization’s Social Media Strategy Map. It is full of resource links. Taking 5 minutes to walk through the presentation at the beginning of the blog post may be the best 5 minute start to a successful social media strategy for your organization.

How about your groups? Have you had some difficulty getting started? What are your thoughts on getting started?

When should organizations NOT pursue a social media strategy?

Noticed a very interesting question on Beth’s Blog the other day:

I’m on the hunt for stories about nonprofits and social media for the WeAreMedia project.   The story I’m looking for is about how a nonprofit organization considered a social media strategy and decided it wasn’t the right fit.

This got us to thinking… with all the very real benefits of social media in nonprofits and associations (and there are many!), are there some organizations that would benefit more from not jumping on the bandwagon? Some circumstances that would doom a social media strategy to be a waste of time and money?

We asked Sig VanDamme for his insight on “the hallmarks of an organization that should not pursue social media.” Here are some of what Sig says are the telltale signs that an organization is either not ready or not suited:

1. You don’t have champions willing to go the distance.
   Though you no doubt have some people inside the organization clamoring for a social media strategy (otherwise, why would you be pursuing one?), a successful adoption of blogging, forum partipation, or online communities requires early adopters to be put through the wringer – to participate in and evangelize your efforts unyieldingly during the startup period. Don’t have these people? Don’t count on getting through to the rest of your constituents.
2. There is too much competition within your organization.
   Though this may be more applicable to associations than nonprofits, the fact is that social media is collaborative by nature. In order for members to successfully adopt these tools, they need to be willing to cooperate, share, and take on the spirit of openness. A social networking site for the Upstate New York Homebuilder Association, for instance, probably wouldn’t flourish. With no one willing to divulge competitive information, what would people talk about?
3. Your constituents aren’t tech-savvy.
   Could the AARP benefit from a social media strategy? Hypothetically. But there are many organizations whose success at social media would require not just teaching constituents to interact with the organization in a new way, but overcoming a potentially deep-deated resistance to technology in the first place. Frankly, the obstacles to getting a social media strategy off the ground are daunting to begin with!

What are your thoughts? Agree or disagree with Sig? Other considerations? And if you do have any real-life stories of organizations that tried social media and then thought better of it, please head over to Beth’s Blog and help her out.