How Associations Tell Their Stories – Association Hustle Podcast – Episode 213

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12/11/2019



Associations don’t need to tell their stories, they need to tell their members’ stories! This episode explores the three types of stories you should be telling about how your association helps you members.

 

Transcript:
Hello and welcome to JP Moery’s Association Hustle Podcast. President of the Moery Company, JP’s mission is to arm today’s associations with insight and strategy to thrive in a progressively complex and competitive business landscape. Twenty-first century associations must move forward with a little bit of hustle and revenue development at their core. Here’s JP.
Association storytelling… it sounds like that’s a session at some ASAE convention! I’m going to give you a little bit of my perspective. The associations need to tell their members’ story more. I realize that’s more work. You’ve got to capture that content. A lot of the association communication, even about their value proposition, even about the success stories of the organization is more about the association rather than the members. And, what I’m finding increasingly around membership development, it’s the stories that members have that are most important for the organization.
So, let me give you a couple of examples. And, by the way, I think this is a fantastic opportunity in the digital communication’s Internet 2.0 world, or whatever the heck we’re in right now! It’s built for this kind of organic, rough, authentic type of communication. Which is, by the way, what you’re going to get from your association members. So, as an example, I have a story from a member about how they’ve been affected by a regulatory issue and how an association helped them. I use this example often, because it’s true and it happened, association member prospect had a problem they didn’t even know existed about a regulation in California. They had product that was going to be illegal to sell to consumers in that state. They didn’t know about it until the association made them familiar with it. That was an easy sell once they were aware of it, once they knew the association was monitoring the situation and, in fact, they were negotiating with the regulatory body about some of the provisions in this regulation. Oh my God, that association prospect signed up right away. So that’s the kind of information or storytelling that we need.
Education. If you have an educational or training program worth its salt, I know that you have individuals that could tell a story about how it made them a better executive. How they became a better executive made their company better, more profitable, more innovative, more relevant in the industry. That’s the thing that’s missing in the educational storytelling that might be valuable to your industry and, not only your prospective members, but your existing members because they’re the people that buy the training and the educational programming the most.
Finally, I want to talk about business development and storytelling. Oh my gosh, folks, if we don’t have stories about how your members are working together, or how they’re collaborating on projects, then we’ve got a real problem with our value proposition. I was in a manufacturing association meeting the other day where a member told a story about how they were getting ready to buy a new piece of equipment. They called a competitor, and another manufacturing member, that had the piece of equipment so they could visit and see that piece of equipment in action. That’s only possible in associations. Those are the stories that we must tell because it’s relevant, because it’s real, because it actually happened and the people in the industry are the storytellers themselves. This is essential in this world that we’re in. Can you imagine those stories being broadcast on Facebook, captured in video on LinkedIn, or a part of your Twitter feed? You want to be an association storyteller? That’s the way to get it done.
Hey, I hope this podcast on storytelling was helpful for you. Thanks for listening to the Association Hustle. Bye bye!
We hope you enjoyed this edition of JP Moery’s Association Hustle Podcast. We’d love to connect with you. Check out our blog at MoeryCompany.com and subscribe to our weekly newsletter. You can also connect with JP on LinkedIn and Twitter @JPMoery, as well as the Moery Company’s Instagram and Facebook page. To purchase a copy of JP’s book, Association Hustle: Top Strategies for Association Growth, go to JPMoery.com. 

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