Unlocking the Power of Content for Associations

I was thrilled to be a guest on the Association Adviser podcast. Naylor CEO Christine Shaw and I talked about how content represents associations’ value, aligning organizational and departmental priorities, making content more successful, and the value of truly understanding your audiences’ needs.

 

Podcast: Unlocking the Power of Content for Associations

See the details and show notes on Naylor’s website

Lightly edited transcript:

It helps to really think of your offerings in their totality and figure out what that means to you. The offerings are almost invariably going to be content. This is a strategic thinking effort, and non-dues revenue is part of that.

Christine Shaw: Hi, and welcome to the Association Advisor Podcast, brought to you by Naylor Association Solutions.

Hilary, you have such an amazing background. Would you please share with our listeners what led you to this work, and why you’re so passionate about it?

Hilary Marsh: Sure. I started my professional life as a magazine editor, and when the internet came along, I had to figure out how content fit into this new media. Every organization that’s online is a publisher, whether they think of themselves that way or not. And my magazine experience taught me that there’s a really valuable place for an editorial role. Content strategy really is that for any kind of organization. I’m passionate about helping associations add that lens, add that layer to the work that they do.

Christine Shaw: That’s fantastic. A lot of people had to make that pivot when the online strategy came to fruition. So, good for you that you’ve done it. And I also love that you shared about your passion and support of associations.

We know associations are very mission-driven and aim to create value for their members in a lot of ways. So, let’s dig a little bit more into the role that content specifically plays for associations in delivering a mission and providing solutions to challenges that we face.

Hilary Marsh: I used to work for the National Association of Realtors, and I realized then that associations are content machines. The the products and programs and services and resources they offer, publications, conferences, original research, advocacy — really all of the work they do is content. Content is how they provide their value to members and to their various audiences and constituents.

Christine Shaw: Well, obviously, we agree because that’s what we do. Content can drive that member engagement because it’s so important. Now, with that said, with associations, they have to carefully balance the organizational, individual roles, and departmental alignment.

Hilary Marsh: Adding on to my previous answer, the people who create all of those really valuable programs and products and services for members don’t think of themselves as content creators. I really struggled with how to make all of those subject matter experts inside an organization realize that what they do is create content. And so, I have coined it as ‘Content is the way that our work is manifested in the world’ because when we say content strategy, we don’t mean the communication department or marketing department or media relations only, we really mean everyone.

A strategy for an organization’s content is integrally a part of the strategy for the thing itself. A strategy for the program itself must include a strategy for the content of or about the program.

Christine Shaw: You bring up an excellent point, which is a great segue into. So, you’re talking about the individual work and then, obviously, the association’s content creation. How does one, in an association  align the association’s goals and the individual department goals while keeping this whole process organized? That, I think, can be overwhelming. So, give us some of your suggestions.

Hilary Marsh: I often refer to content strategy as being like an orchestra conductor or an association. In an orchestra, if every musician, regardless of how talented they are, is playing their own music in their own time, or if every section is playing its own music in its own time at the same time as the other sections, the audience experiences it as cacophony. And yet, there’s a much deeper and richer experience for an audience in hearing the whole symphony by an orchestra as opposed to just a solo violin, for example.

If we translate that to the collection of work that the association does, it’s the same thing. If they’re not connected, the audience doesn’t know where to go first, doesn’t know what to listen to first or pay attention to first. And then associations wonder, why aren’t they knowing about and using all these things we offer, which we know are valuable to them? And, in fact, they’re almost always amazing and relevant and valuable.

There are a few tools and practices that associations can do to connect the individual work to the greater picture. And you would think that a strategic plan would address that, and it kind of does, but then everybody goes off and they do their own piece and they forget to connect back to the core mission and how their individual piece rolls up.

I think the tools are setting a common voice and tone. In my work, we call that a message architecture, and sometimes it’s part of branding work, but sometimes branding work focuses on the visuals and the graphics and the colors without focusing equally as much on the organization’s voice. That’s one piece.

Another one is the taxonomy, the tagging of content, so that whatever topic something’s about is labeled with the same topic, whether department X or Y or Z creates it. And the other one is not only a content calendar, but the planning exercise and conversations around that content calendar.

Everybody has initiatives or programs that they’re working on. So, if we publish them in a central organization-wide content calendar and everyone looks at it and talks about it, then everyone will understand, oh, this thing that I’m working on, gosh, that relates really well to that thing that you’re working on. We should collaborate on that instead of creating two separate documents because we all want to explain the issue to the members and let’s explain it together or you write it and then I’ll include it or link to it. Those are the tools I can think of.

Christine Shaw: Those are really helpful suggestions and I love, Hilary, that you use the orchestra example because I think we all can visualize and listen to a beautiful piece of music, but then behind the scenes everything that goes on to bring that all together. So, that should be a good thing we all keep in the back of our minds as we’re doing things like what’s the beautiful musical outcome to be and if you can remember that, it helps guide you through the process and the practice. Great suggestions.

I love that you talked about tagging, because that shows your online chops that you developed from pivoting to just imprint to online because it’s huge.

So, let’s talk about content in terms of being an exclusive member benefit. As you know, a lot of associations tout their content as this exclusive member benefit and they keep a lot of that gated or behind a wall that you only get if you’re a paid member.

However, in your opinion, content should be available and accessible. What approach benefits the association or why does this benefit the association along with its audience? Can you help us understand a little bit of your beliefs there?

Hilary Marsh: The core of my work is asking questions. It’s what I do all day. The two main questions that I ask over and over and over again are Who’s your audience? and What’s your goal?

If the goal for a particular initiative is making sure that every member sees this thing and uses this thing, then we’re probably looking at volume. And the issue is that content behind a firewall gets a fraction of the use of content that’s open. You’re never going to be able to succeed in your goal if you keep content behind a firewall. Because that gets into tech issues about how long your website session stays good, and do you remember your login, and what if you’re on your home computer versus your work computer or your phone? Do you have your login? Is a member really going to pursue that?

The other challenge is that it’s usually leadership that wants to keep member content behind a firewall. And with the huge explosion of volume of content out there in the world, the risk of somebody finding and using this content — gosh, we all want that risk in a way. We don’t have a problem of too much use of our content. In fact, we have the opposite.

Don’t worry that your content’s out there, because there’s also a lot of other things. Rather, make sure that everyone who might need what you have can find it and use it.

Christine Shaw: Leaning into your tagging example, in your online experience, when people are searching, it’s much easier for them to find you, so you don’t know how many new people and potential new members you could be bringing to your association by ungating that content. So, I think that’s great advice and a good perspective on it. Thank you for that.

Also, let’s talk about a method that you’ve developed for the foundational content strategy and making sure you understand the audience. I know you describe that as empathy-based personas. So, talk a little bit about that and how they work in relation to developing value-driven content, please.

Hilary Marsh: Sure. Remember I said I ask those two questions, who’s your audience and what’s your goal? Knowing your audience isn’t a demographic segmentation exercise only.

And it’s not even the typical personas that I see all too often, which is: This is Sally, she’s 32, she’s been in this profession for three years, we have these three things for her. That’s a very inside-out approach to the audience. Empathy-based personas go much deeper into understanding who is Sally, what is she motivated for, what are her challenges, what is she afraid of, what does she need, and then how does our work fit into what she’s about.

The process starts with basic demographics, and then it asks people to prioritize. Of all the dozen audience stories that we have, which four are the most important? When I first learned of this technique, when I worked at the National Association of Realtors, I thought there is no way, we’ve got 83 committees and subcommittees and forums, we’re a giant organization, there’s no way we’re going to be able to distill this down to four. And in fact, we did.

We did it in person because it was far pre-pandemic, and with voting dots, and there turned out to be some top ones and then some outliers, and we interwove some of the characteristics of the outliers into the main ones so that we could take a deeper dive into what makes these people tick. So, we build them as real human beings with their motivations and their challenges and all of that. Are they ambitious? Are they in front of a desk? What are they interested in?

And then we go through the second part, which I call the audience engagement journey. Do they even know about us? Are they dimly aware? Are they using our stuff? Are they involved with, engaged with us? And then finally, are they kind of our own personal PR agents where they’re getting all their peers and colleagues also engaged with us because they find our work so valuable? And those two things together are transformative.

I find that you can validate these with focus groups if you recruit people based on the demographics you identify in the first session, and then you ask them the questions about what messages are the baseline for you, what would be amazing, and how can we help you more? Every time I’ve done this exercise, it always validates when we have a focus group. Not every client has a budget for a focus group, but I assure them that the initial work, which we do with staff because they’ve typically interacted with various kinds of members, so they can bring their own member-centric experience with them, and they know other human beings who are like that.

They know people who are in their early stages of their careers, whether they are in that profession or not. These are folks, for example, who don’t know what they don’t know yet. So, you need to help them understand what their path is going to be, what they should be looking at. Thinking about what human beings in that kind of space are like is super helpful about really being able to put yourself in their shoes when you’re creating content for them, and that’s the challenge: Subject matter experts inside associations are so good at what they do that they forget that the audience doesn’t live in their head. The audience really needs what they have, but they don’t know the lingo.

So, we have, for example, people in advocacy putting out emails that say, ‘Act now on HR 432B.’ What does that mean? The issue turns out to be super important for the members to join in a call for action for, but unless you help them understand what’s the issue, why is it a threat or important for you to ask your congressional representative to vote for or against, then they can take action.

Christine Shaw: Hilary, it’s clear why this is your passion and your calling in life.

I love the methodology you created, and you did it in a way to help others understand the process. It’s a two-step process in really getting into the minds and the personalities of the potential audience and leaders, so that’s fantastic. You’ve done a great job at outlining the content strategy approach, some tools, some tips, everything you do to create your content and align it.

Tell me from your perspective, how do you see content as such a driver for non-dues revenue to help support associations’ investment in their future?

Hilary Marsh: Honestly, non-dues revenue isn’t always the primary focus of the work that my associations do. It’s the member value that’s a greater focus, but I have seen associations repackage a lot of their content in a way that can give it a new life, let’s say.

There’s also the idea of kind of a bite, snack, meal. So, bite, snack, meal is a content technique where you understand that different people have needs for different levels of depth in the content they consume. If you think about not a specific piece of content constructed as a bite/snack/meal, but a journey through your content as a bite/snack/meal, that’s so interesting because if the bite is a blog post, the snack might be the detailed report, and the meal is a conference where that’s created. It helps to really think of your offerings in their totality and figure out what that means to you. The offerings are almost invariably going to be content.

So, while it all manifests itself on the website, this isn’t really a website effort. This isn’t really a technology effort. This is a strategic thinking effort, and non-dues revenue is part of that. Connecting the products you sell to the products that you offer to members is a real yin-yang there.

Christine Shaw: I like that you talk about the first priority being member value because member retention is also a big part of this. To have a strong association, you need to have a strong membership, and that membership that you can retain year in, year out, and so your content strategy definitely speaks to that. We all know the benefits that generating extra revenue can help for associations and what they can invest for the future of their association, whether it’s technology or new initiatives or anything that they feel can help beat advocacy for their association and their members. You have so much experience in content creation.

Obviously, from what we’ve talked about today, you definitely stayed ahead of that curve personally, but what would you say we need to be doing now, and what would your suggestions be that we can all do to stay ahead of the curve as we go forward into the future?

Hilary Marsh: I think this is probably a different answer than you might be expecting, but for me, the key to all of this is creating that content strategy and operationalizing it — making sure that you do what it takes to make it stick. Part of that is an HR issue, so when I say content strategy is an HR issue, people usually give me a puzzled look in response, but if those subject matter experts are expected to create content in a way that’s going to resonate with the audience to do that translation we talked about a few minutes ago, then they need the skills to do it, they need the time to do it, and it needs to become part of their job description. If content strategy is going to be sustainable, the organization really needs to look at its roles and processes to make sure that the people who are supposed to be doing this work have the tools and permission they need, and that it becomes part of what they’re evaluated on.

That’s not the sexy AI kind of answer, because I don’t think this is a AI problem, I think it’s a strategic problem that associations really need to focus on that way.

Christine Shaw: The way I translate that from listening to your answer is it needs to be part of your organization’s DNA, and it starts with the talent and how you bring that talent into the organization.

I think that’s a great point that we often overlook, and so if you don’t fundamentally have that as part of the foundational DNA, it’s hard to create strategic content, so that’s great.

Hilary Marsh: A few years ago, I co-authored a study for the ASAE Foundation called “Content Strategies for a Changing World” that was a study of associations’ adoption and maturity in their content strategy work, and there really is a journey that every association goes through in its maturity, and the end stage of its maturity is exactly what we’ve been talking about.

It’s that everybody understands what content they have, how long it’s supposed to live, who it’s for, and why. They might organize their content by topic, so if somebody comes with a problem to solve, they don’t have to look at the magazine and the conference section and the advocacy section and this and that or the other. It’s organized for them, so that it’s done with the audience and their needs in mind, and everybody understands their place in that, so there’s not a competition for attention and people lobbying for more space on the home page, as we see all the time in a website effort. Everybody has a journey in getting there.

Christine Shaw: That makes total sense. Thank you for referencing that study. By the way, Hilary, is there a way listeners can get their hands on that study if they would like to look at it? Absolutely.

Hilary Marsh: I have a bit.ly link, and it’s on the ASAE Foundation website.

Christine Shaw: Amazing. That’s such a great resource and tool, so thanks for sharing that.

My final question is more of a fun one. With summer coming up, people like to read. Can you recommend a book for our guests so they can be learning even more after this episode?

Hilary Marsh: Well, this is not beach reading for sure, but I have two. One is the bible of content strategy. It’s called Content Strategy for the Web, and it’s by Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach.

I have not written a book, but I would think that the collection of articles and things on my website also serve as useful reading, because I do always write with associations in mind.

Christine Shaw: We’ll be sure to include that link in our episode notes, so thanks for sharing that. And Hilary, if our listeners want to get in touch with you, how can they connect with you after listening to our episode?

Hilary Marsh: My website is contentcompany.biz, and I’ve got a newsletter. For anyone who’s really interested in joining in on content strategy work, I run an online community for content strategists, and the URL is content-strategy.com.

Christine Shaw: Thank you so much. Wow, this has been great. So much information, and we really appreciate your willingness to share all of your knowledge with our audience, and you do a lot of amazing work for the association space and beyond. Thanks for your time today, Hilary. I’ve really enjoyed having you on as our guest.

Hilary Marsh: Thanks so much for having me.

Christine Shaw: I appreciate it. Until next time, thanks. Thank you for listening to the Association Advisor Podcast, brought to you by Naylor Association Solutions.