We keep building it … and they don’t come

I have a confession to make. I have experienced conference apps both as an end user (conference attendee) and as a conference provider. I have also been both a user and provider of apps meant to streamline membership interactions, such as association member services, purchases, publications, discussion forums, content libraries, and the like. Some of them were really first-rate apps in terms of their ability to make user access to member and conference services frictionless and powerful.

I hated them all.

They all shared one fatal flaw and deterrent to user acceptance. They all were separate applications. One more icon on the already crowded home page of my iPhone (and one that is far from the first thing I think to check when I glance at my phone). Even the turbo-charged meetings app, with its sophisticated ability to keep me informed of formal and informal events of interest and can create a plan to follow them. Even with its ability to connect to other conference attendees, get notifications, provide directions, and handle schedule changes. To take advantage of all that, I have to leave my normal mode of operations and live within the association-provided app. Real life just doesn’t work that way.

I don’t want to have consciously shift from my normal mode of operations into association mode. I don’t want to have to open a conference app to see my conference schedule. I want it dynamically integrated into whatever calendaring and time management tools I use every day. I don’t want to have to think “I wonder what my association can do for me today” before I get the benefits of the technology the association has invested in. Chances are that your members don’t want to either.

It’s not realistic to expect your members to “live” in your association’s application ecosystem all the time in order to benefit from the technology you’ve built, no matter how good your technology is. I live my life by the calendar (Outlook), task management (Reminders), email (Outlook), messaging (Apple Messages), search (Duck Duck Go) and other systems on my phone. None of those systems are context specific. They all integrate nicely with each other. That system is already present, always present, and encompasses all my roles in life (professional, personal, volunteer roles, hobbies, and interests) without me having to think about or look multiple places. If I need to think about looking somewhere else (e.g.; go into a conference app to see my opportunities at the meeting or go to the membership portal to see what conversations are going on in the forums), chances are I will forget to do it. If I need to think of the association app as the place to start a conversation on a matter of professional interest within the association’s domain that was triggered somewhere else in my everyday tech environment, I probably won’t do it. And even if I do send myself off onto the island that is the association or conference app, the minute I get a message or notification from my day-to-day world, I am going to abandon the association island and dive back into my everyday ecosystem. And even the most valuable, timely, and important thing the association app is following disappears from my awareness. Awareness I won’t get back unless and until it occurs to me to go back onto the island to look for it.

The good news is it doesn’t have to be this way. But it does take a change in perspective. Instead of introducing a new, “best in class” mobile association product, service, or feature that does it all, think about connecting with your members where they already are.

Want two very rudimentary and widely deployed examples where this has already happened? Think about the seminar registration system that lets me add the event to whatever calendar I use (and does so with all the relevant information I need about time, place, confirmation number, etc. contained in the calendar event), without ever leaving the email that prompted me to register in the first place. Think about the forum digest posts that push all the discussions I have flagged as relevant into one email in my email reader of choice without making me decide I am going to check out what’s going on in the forums.

But the technology of automation should and is increasing in its capacity to allow us to do even more. Like the ability to save individual conference events into my everyday calendar rather than a conference app, does it with a single click, and in a form that remains actively connected to the source, so any changes in time, room location, or whatever that event management subsequently makes is reflected automatically in my everyday scheduling app. Or an online forum reader that condenses all my content venues in a single daily digest, rather than one from the membership forum, another from the journal(s), and allows me to add as many additional discussion forums/content sources from unaffiliated providers as I want to. And maybe even does so by topic, not source, along with suggestions of topics in areas of the forum I am not signed up for that actually relate to topics I have shown an interest in[1].

A recent post from ASAE put it this way: make the shift from creating apps to integrating apps.

This has implications both for technology internal to the organization (how your staff engages with and leverages your data and content capacity) as well as to connecting and engaging with the membership you hope to create more value for by serving them better.

To be sure, it’s easier to do internally. Your internal data and IT infrastructure is a closed system that you exercise end-to-end control over, with a limited, fixed, and fairly stable cohort of users.

But the real power will come with integrations that connect the tools your members are already using with the value your association can add to their lives.

Stop thinking about creating a “one stop shop” for all things association, one place where your members can (but also must) come to for everything you have to offer; start looking for ways to be useful with functionality that shows up in the places your members already happen to be. Don’t make them come to your store; put what you have to offer on the shelves in the stores they already visit.

[1] The typical design of association discussion forums is self-limiting and self-defeating. It is based on general identity (by position or area of interest). If I am a CEO, I get made part of a discussion board for CEOs, as if every CEO everywhere is concerned about the same issues. So if I am a CEO currently in need of information on a financial or tax issue, I have to go searching for the CFO section to get more specialized input. Worse still, I might be tempted to post the same question multiple places, spawning multiple conversations that aren’t connecting with each other.

Disclaimer

The ideas contained here are my own. I do not speak for any organization or company.

AI was used to generate the image accompanying this post. I do NOT use AI to generate or edit drafts.