We're back to explore more family dynamics under the roof of AI for associations. It’s time to meet the whimsical wonders of the AI brood. Our AI generators and revivers are the poets, the musicians, and the artists of the family. They’re the proverbial renaissance men and women. They’re skilled in multiple musical instruments, are multi-disciplinary in their art, have published a few novels, and occassionally dabble in poetry.
These creators, who fall squarely in the category of Generative AI, have the ability to produce something entirely new, or revise based on something that already exists.
Let’s get to know them.
The Generators & the Revivers
The Generators are the blank slate faction of AI that has the ability to scrape data, synthesize, and build for digestible consumption. Their twins, the Revivers, are the division of creators that use original works and data to refine and refurbish. Both can work in tandem across most communication channels and vehicles. Both work hard on producing their intended outputs. Both glean their version of innovation off of droves of data and other works. And yes, both need some coaxing and guidance to get to where they need to be.
Let’s take a look at some real life association applications for this dazzling duo.
The Generators
Think content building and concept development. They're not combing through what's already been done. They're starting with a clean slate. But like any creative, they have their vision while you have yours. You'll need to go through a few (or more) variations with them to get to your final product. Here are some association-specific examples:
Catalyze your content—Consider a handbook that guides members through maximizing their membership for highest return on investment. Or a white paper with a particular topical focus in line with your members’ needs. AI can do it with the right narrative guidance from you. In your brand, with your visuals, in your tone, and in any content format that resonates with your audiences.
Win back your website—Consider an entirely revamped website that caters to new generations. We’re talking fresher content, more modernized, animated imagery, a better UI, and most importantly—one that's entirely dynamically-based on membership categories and job functions. AI’s got your back on web and landing page creation from top to bottom.
Champion your chats—Your members are your lifeblood. While calls, in-person events, and digital learning opportunities are a great way to get to know them better, chatbots can also play a role. Generative AI chatbots can hold "human-ish" text-based conversations with your members. Through their natural learning ability, they can understand your members’ questions and interests, and contextually reply in a way that meets their needs. Think of what this can do from an engagement and retention perspective. You can set-up an intelligent conversational AI as a voice between your members and your brand.
Vitalize your visuals—If Shutterstock just isn’t cutting it and you’re tight on time or budget for a traditional designer, consider designing an entirely new look and feel for your next conference using an AI Generator. AI can build the concept imagery, and you can then apply it to different formats (i.e. emails, landing pages, ads, etc.) so that you have an entirely new look and feel for your campaign.
The Revivers
They are the editors that are skilled in rebooting original works. Refiners by nature, they're going to take creative liberty and work from your jumping off points so, if you're not keen on what they've put forward, have them try, try, and try again. They're up to the challenge. Here are some association-specific examples:
Mobilize your member welcome—Building emails that resonate and appeal can be taxing and can take up a lot of creative juices. Particularly when you’re running multiple campaigns for many programs at a time. Consider a member onboarding 3-part drip series with pumped up, customized copy, content, and imagery for each of your membership categories. AI can edit and rework the structure and content of your emails in seconds, building efficiencies from an email production perspective, allowing you to focus on strategic ideation and planning activities.
Adapt your articles—You want to appeal to new markets and generate more awareness of your organization. Consider repurposing magazine articles from the last 2-3 years into renovated blogs. Once all of the articles have been converted to juicy, updated blogs, you can schedule the blogs to post once a month automatically across the calendar year. Suddenly your thought leadership is out there at a regular clip and you’ve spared yourself the time in creating entirely new content.
Augment your ads—Consider getting a gaggle of punchy headers and copy for Google ad campaigns designed to generate leads for membership recruitment. You can choose what copy makes sense or grab a few options and A/B test them. From Google to LinkedIn to sponsored ads, AI is your go-to for creative campaign tweaking and development.
Vamp up your videos—Consider repurposing your webinar videos into more bite-sized modular promotional videos. You can start with a download of the webinar transcript and then leverage text to video AI to build entirely new micro videos based on the transcript. You can even leverage multiple existing videos to produce an entirely revitalized video (think your org video). Or you can lean on AI to write the script, pull together visual components and transitions, and edit everything into a final product if you can believe that?! Since associations have a wealth of content, and videos (particularly the smaller chunks) are on the rise, AI is an amazing asset to expand your content portfolio.
Mastering AI dialect
Now does AI create these with the flick of a button? In some cases, yes, particularly as it relates to the AI Revivers. But when it comes to the Generators, sometimes they need more of a push. After all, they’re starting completely from scratch and need the most direction from you to meet expectations. That’s where prompts come in. When it comes to GenAI prompts, consider AI the paintbrush and canvas, with you supplying the paint colors and creative direction.
When choosing your paint colors, or even the medium for that matter, you’ll want to be as specific as possible and keep the natural bias to a minimum. Here are a few pointers to get you there:
Specificity wins—Creative direction includes the ‘what’, the ‘who’, and the ‘when’. Always start with your topic. Consider it your model. Make sure you’re wrapping it in a cloak of context. Choose your setting, secondary visuals, overall tone, and theme. Think of a traditional design brief. That’s essentially the conversation you need to have with AI. The more specific you can get, the better and closer you’ll be to a final product.
AI can roleplay—Even before you start storytelling, you should consider context to set the stage for AI. It’s exhaustingly literal, so you'll need to “tell it what to do” even before you “tell it what to do”. Let me explain that further. Let’s say that you want AI to build a script based on the benefits of membership. You could point AI to your content and have it extract from there. And yes, that will get you to a point. But, what if you want to go beyond what you’ve said in the past about your org’s member benefits? You want AI taking the reigns on positioning. Stage one is telling AI what to do—first tell AI its role in this request. The prompt would go something like this:
“Act as if you’re teaching me about membership benefits.”
Now AI knows its role and has context in terms of how it’s going to fulfill the request. And now that you’ve set the stage, you can move into your main request. Based on this combo, instead of taking the top 10 benefits, AI is going to tell you something new about how these benefits can truly bring value to your members, from its accumulated, independent perspective.
Teaching AI takes time—Don’t assume that you’re going to throw some thoughts at GenAI and it’s going to intuitively work through them and spit magic out with your first go-around. No, you’re most likely going to go through several iterations to get there. It's important to keep an inventory going so that you don’t need to start from scratch every time you’re looking for a new creation. If you land on a prompt that rocks, keep a record of it in your Prompt Library. This is your (and your association's) guide to greater efficiency and efficacy when it comes to generative AI.
Make the task actionable—If you want AI to do something, make sure you’re using actionable words, including but not limited to: Build a report, summarize a paragraph, create an image, build a list, compare the effectiveness of two campaigns, construct the flow of a workflow, predict which members will renew in 2025. AI wants to work. It just needs the right motivation to produce the right output or format. Words and sentences with assigned actions do the trick.
Articulate limits: You’ll find out fairly quickly what happens if you build prompts without restrictions. If you have requirements, make sure to articulate those parameters within your prompt. For instance, you may have an email go out for membership renewal. You want the email to be compelling but to the point. Specify that you want no less than 50 words for a paragraph, and 3 bullets with less than 10 words for each bullet. Otherwise, if you’re not putting in word count restrictions, depending on the topic and/or what data sources you’re pulling from, you could get an encyclopedia of text back. Other common rules include: exclusions, do’s and don’ts, and formatting direction (i.e. text with subheadings, paragraphs etc.). Anything that you typically take for granted when it comes to story-building and formatting should be included in your prompt.
Avoid natural bias: Bias is unfortunately built into every corner of our society. The data that AI consumes to learn is riddled with it. So you really want to minimize it from entering the picture as much as possible. Keep in mind, bias also goes beyond prejudices and stereotypes into just plain human preferences. It’s critically important that you’re eliminating your inclination to bias within your prompts. For instance, if you ask a question in a leading way, it will produce the answer that you were inadvertently angling at. Easier said than done, but your best bet is to ask without intention.
Your search for family
Now can you find all of these AI tools out there? Of course you can. Will all of them sit under a single sign-on. Probably not. The best you can do is find a tool that serves up the 'meat-and-potatoes' needs of your org, and then build from there.
Take HubSpot, for example. HubSpot, and it's never-ending roadmap, already accomplishes about 75% of the above AI functions just through its native interface. When it comes to video producing, it's not there quite yet (but may be very soon). In the meantime, search "AI for video creation' in HubSpot's marketplace and you'll get tons of plug-in options.
Here's the baked in AI Generator & Reviver functionality within HubSpot today:
1—AI Chatbot
2—AI Content Assistant:
Of course, as with with any AI, remember that AI may be the car, but you're the one driving. You pull up the map, put in the coordinates, and steer the car in the direction you want to go. It'll be up to you to decide if you're happy with the end destination.
Better data means better performance through AI
As stewards of association data, we at HighRoad are committed to leveling orgs up on data activation and integration. Learn how HighRoad Spark + HubSpot's AI CRM can quickly put you in the results zone. Book a consultation today to learn more.
