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As keynotes for Reset, Reinvent, Revenue 2021, Burrell-Stinson and Stuart will share their crisis learnings

by COVID 19Media

For the two keynote speakers for Reset, Reinvent, Revenue 2021, June 16-17, the clear common denominator is how much each of them learned during the pandemic and can apply now to make her or his organization better.

Denise Burrell-Stinson, head of WP Creative Team in the Creative Group at The Washington Post, and Scott Stuart, CEO, Turnaround Management Association, both emanate excitement for the opportunity to impart their wisdom to the association publication professional audience.

“One of the things we learned at the Post in 2020 is that there’s still an appetite for marketing content,” Burrell-Stinson said. “But it had to be done a specific way. One of the ways that we were able to get through that time and 2020 was by being in constant conversation with our audience. ‘What’s the best way to reach you? What’s the type of messaging that you want to know about? What do you believe has value?’

“They were like, ‘You know what, we still want to know about brands, but only if they’re helping people. We want to know that the brands that you’re working with have a POV on social justice.’ They want gender equity and racial parity all the way across the organization.”

For Stuart, a light went on about the way they were reaching out to members. “I learned more about human behavior in the last year than I ever put thought to,” he said. “Most people in the world are introverted extraverts… We learned in the virtual environment that we need to be more focused on that personality attribute.”

Basically, he said that few of us are comfortable walking into a room of 500 just knowing a few people. The virtual environment has given those people a kind of pass and comfort level to pursue more of what associations offer. We need to continue to give them that pathway.

“We have had a value proposition—with our 54 chapters and more than 10,000 global members—that as a member you can avail yourself of any program that a chapter has at the member rate,” Stuart said. “I’ve been hammering at that for a while. In the virtual atmosphere, people saw it, and it became a reality. So a member from a chapter in the UK and one in Toronto [will now attend each other’s events]. When people see that global reality, it gives them pride about the association. They now see the value of the greater organization that they’re a part of. And that pride cascades to everyone in the organization.”

Burrell-Stinson also believes in that pride and how that transcends internally as well to staff. “No one should ever feel that their sphere of influence is too small to make change,” she said. “If you’re working for a platform, a content creator, a digital magazine, the everyday results of your job are a contribution that ladders up to what the overall goals are.” Even in her days of fact-checking, she felt she was making a big contribution to the publication.

They both also mentioned the importance of creativity, not the first characteristic you think of for CEOs and brand marketers. “We’re looking to see how our creativity and ideas and how we reach audiences can be a driver of revenue,” Burrell-Stinson said. “When that’s done well, it’s a good marriage of business and creativity. We used to think that they have to live very separately, The person who was the creative mind was not the business mind, and the person who was the business mind could not be counted on to be creative. I’ve found that as absolutely not true. Everyone can embrace [those two attributes].”

Asked how the Turnaround Management Association was able to pivot so well to put on a successful virtual event, Stuart simply said, “Creativity. We know that a certain percentage will come [to an event] for education. We also know that people are Zoomed out.” They also want to have some fun; they’re used to going to Las Vegas for a TMA event.

“How can I give them a feeling that they’re not just stuck on Zoom,” Stuart asked. “We created 24 [short, interactive] sessions on industry topics, built a networking room, covered DEI. We had Colonel [Robert J.] Darling who was in a bunker with Dick Cheney on 9/11. We added Virtual Reality to get a casino experience and dueling pianos, had an illustrator doing drawings while sessions were going on.

“We created variety and”—Stuart slowed down here to accentuate—“actionable optionality. [We brought] you as close to in-person networking as you could ever imagine. Sponsors saw they got value out of it. The only downside was that because people expected the ‘same old,’ it caused us to market louder to get the message out. But once people saw it, they were our great evangelizers.”

That’s something all of us strive for. How much better is it when someone else talks you up, especially a member? That connection to the audience is something Burrell-Stinson came back to time and again during her interview. Before reaching out, she said it’s important—especially during these times—for staff to feel aligned with the organization’s message.

During the early stages of the pandemic, “I was one of those people showing up and asking, ‘What is my job right now?’ I can’t sit here selling. I really wanted to know that I felt right about what my job was.” Fortunately, the Post felt the same. “Let’s talk to our audience and see what they need right now,” she said.

“We did this deep, intentional engaging of the audience. ‘Tell us what it is you need to know. Tell us what’s helpful. Tell us what’s respectful. Tell us what empowers you.’ And they did. And when we listened to the audience we had our North Star. They told us what was going to work. When we had that information, we were actually able to take it to brands and say we’ve heard from this audience, they’re vocal, they’re smart and let’s do more than just market to them. Let’s really engage them on their terms.”

You will want to engage with Burrell-Stinson and Stuart on June 16-17 and hear more of what we can take out of the pandemic to help our organizations to Reset, Reinvent (and grow) Revenue.

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How a ‘Roadmap in Reverse’ Works in Literature AND Business

by Media

“I never write the first sentence of a book until I know the last sentence. I made the mistake of not doing that with A Time to Kill, and I got halfway through and was completely lost. I learned that lesson the hard way. Now, I finish an outline before I start writing. Sometimes, I get halfway through the outline and realize I’m lost and start over. But at least I haven’t written half a book already.”

In that interview with The Washington Post this week, John Grisham is the latest author who I’ve heard talk about the process of knowing how his story ends before he sets out. John Irving was another: “I write the last line, and then I write the line before that.” It makes sense for publishers and media companies as well to know the outcome you want to achieve before putting your strategy into place.

Lately, I’ve come around to Grisham’s process—a “roadmap in reverse” some have called it. When we were still having vacations, my last European adventure started with finding a good return flight from London. Okay, now I can bike ride in Italy on this date, then visit my friend in Paris and see Wimbledon on the way back. Can’t wait for those days to return.

Of course, this isn’t a new theory, especially in business. Here’s an article from the May 1985 Harvard Business Review:

“The ‘backward’ approach I advocate rests on the premise that the best way to design usable research is to start where the process usually ends and then work backward. So we develop each stage of the design on the basis of what comes after it, not before… This procedure takes time for both managers and researchers. But determining where you want to go, then working backward to figure out how to get there, is likely to yield more valuable data leading to fruitful decisions.”

A Power Panel at BIMS 2020 in December said something similar about virtual events: Script the results you want to see first and then work accordingly to make it happen. After 30 minutes of listening to five very smart people talk about the future of events on that panel, I thought back to this idea: What do you want your event to accomplish? What should your ending be?

If you’re the Financial Times, you want more subscribers. If you’re Winsight, you want to bring buyers and sellers together. If you’re an events company like Emerald, you probably want to do both—or just deliver the most overall value possible. If you’re a smaller niche publisher, you may want to bring your audience closer to the editorial people they follow.

And so on. Two other innovators have espoused this process. Jeff Bezos asked the following in a 2012 video interview: “How are we going to work backwards from customers and build a great service or a great product? That’s a key element to invention…”

And LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman has also spoken about this method. “It starts with, what is the end result that you want to have happen?” he asked. Hoffman apparently played games of strategy as a child and knowing how those games worked taught him the type of “reverse-causal thought pattern he espouses.”

B2B publisher Randall-Reilly showcased an excellent 6-minute video a couple years ago they called Marketing Towards a Desired Outcome. In the video, the narrator tells of Ned who works as marketing director for Sophie’s Super Software. His website had plenty of visitors and a low bounce rate. Click-thru rates and email opens were strong, and constant traffic came to his booths. But there was one problem: He wasn’t driving revenue.

“Obviously, impressive results don’t equal increased revenue. Ned needed to align his marketing efforts to what actually drives sales. He decided to work backwards from the point of sale to uncover where his marketing was falling short.

“First he asked himself, ‘What is the typical sale process?’ He realized a sale was preceded by a demo of [the] software. So if a demo was as close as he could get to the sale, how could he generate more demos? To generate leads for demos, Ned could drive phone calls or form submissions. His sales team tended to convert better with forms because they weren’t always available to answer the phone so how could he get more form submissions.

“The answer was to get his product in front of the right prospects. So his next question was, ‘How do I reach the right prospects?”

Back to the literary world, I was once fortunate enough to hear author John Irving talk in person at Georgetown University about this. “I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.”

One of the late Nobel prize-winning, British playwright Harold Pinter’s best plays is Betrayal. It begins at the end of the story and works its way back to the beginning. It’s very powerful. Once you see the outcome, you can focus on how the people got there, seeing the decisions they made to affect that outcome. Makes sense that it also works for business.

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SIIA Hails Markup of IDEA Act

by PolicyPress Release

This morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee moved S. 632, the Inventor Diversity for Economic Advancement (IDEA) Act out of Committee on a bipartisan basis.  The legislation would require the Patent and Trademark Office to amass and publish demographic information about patent applicants.  Jeff Joseph, President and CEO of SIIA, issued the following statement:

“SIIA supports the IDEA Act, and applauds the Committee’s action today. Recent events have drawn attention to systemic inequities in our society.  Good data is essential to determining to what extent those inequities are present in the patent system, and will give the PTO guidance on how to fix them. The IDEA Act requires the PTO to keep track of voluntarily disclosed patent applicant demographic information and publicly report it in the aggregate.  This kind of transparency will help evaluate and ensure that the incentives to innovate are available to everyone regardless of race, gender, or national origin.  We urge its swift enactment.”

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SIIA Statement on American Families Plan

by PolicyPress Release

The following statement was issued by Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) President Jeff Joseph following this evening’s Address to Congress by President Joe Biden:

“As President Biden said this evening, our nation is strongest when everyone has the opportunity to join the workforce and contribute to our economy. The American Families Plan introduced tonight during the President’s address to Congress proposes several initiatives that will help expand opportunity across our nation.

“The plan calls for significant investments in cradle to college education. These investments will make our education system more affordable and accessible for low- and middle-income students and enable historically disenfranchised communities to have a greater opportunity to climb the economic ladder and participate in the American dream. The plan also recognizes the importance and vitality of community colleges to the higher education ecosystem and seeks to address our nation’s teacher shortage. These investments will help create a larger, better educated pool of future employees for our members allowing them to continue to help drive economic growth and innovate.

“The American Families Plan includes a variety of other measures designed to remove barriers that prevent many from fully participating in the workforce. Investments in R&D and broadband will help maintain U.S. leadership in innovation and help close the equity gap in access to technology and education. These measures deserve close consideration and critical review by the Congress.

As Congress considers “pay fors” to cover the necessary investments we urge our political leaders to make wise choices. Following a historically challenging year, there is light at the end of the tunnel for American businesses to help restore and grow our economy and create jobs. Congress must avoid overly punitive tax policies that will handicap the ability for our members to drive growth and create jobs. 

 

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Triple Down on Data, Expand Your Digital, Change Your Culture; Use This Time to Reset and Grow, Kueng Says

by COVID 19Media

“It did take time to get the approval to get a new website. We had focus groups and a wide variety of perspectives. But I’m so glad MOAA did it.” said Yumi Belanga (pictured), senior director, digital programs, office of the CIO, Military Officers Association, in an excellent session with Mark DeVito, president, Beyond Definition, titled The 2020 Association Brand Experience at AMP 2020 last fall.

“We started to understand our members more and how important data is in making these decisions. ‘Do we have data to probe that will be beneficial?’… We also learned a lot more about what everyone’s individual goal was. Sometimes we don’t listen. Listening and not just hearing gets to true collaboration. Step outside yourself to put yourself in their shoes.”

Belanga’s comments evoke one of the priorities—to triple down on data—of a terrific ebook published last year by Lucy Kueng, an internationally renowned expert on digital disruption, titled Transformation Manifesto: 9 Priorities for Now. It delves into how publications professionals can change for the better in the aftermath of the pandemic. She wants us to “seize the opportunities presented by the undeniable crisis we face, because those opportunities are truly huge.”

About data, she writes: “You can’t move from want to need on guesswork. You can only shift… by diving deeply into understanding customers and how you can become more important to them… Triple down on data, not just on the volume flowing into the organization but on the caliber of discussions around that data, on the insights derived from it, the hypotheses you develop and test.”

Let’s look at five more of these priorities, with some AMPlification.

1. Growth will be all about digital. “Organizations that have procrastinated on digital are in a tough place,” writes Kueng. “Their transformation runway is suddenly much shorter. They need to pull off a fast pivot—to traverse what disruption specialists call the ‘valley of death’ where [organizations] that fail to reinvent themselves for a digital world get consigned to a slow death—without the substantial legacy revenues that early movers have used to finance this transition. These ‘digital laggards’ are the ones in survival mode, facing difficult decisions.”

I was speaking this week with Lilia LaGesse, an association publishing strategist and frequent speaker for AM&P. Her exceptional presentation at a Lunch & Learn last year highlighted the three main ways that a magazine can be digital: a page-turner, web-based and immersive. She said that while the page-turner can look pretty cool and maintain existing print production process, its user experience, single level of engagement and sharability are much less than the immersive model. As Keung writes, now is a great time to play digital catch-up. Expand your presence. “Find out where your audiences are in the social media eco-system and get your content out to them there.”

2. Seize the moment to do clean-up work that’s overdue. In the same way we have been cleaning out our homes, Kueng wants us to do that with our business—and stop doing things that aren’t successful. “We have been very good at starting things but terrible at stopping them,” she writes. Look at your legacy products. Are they “hangovers from a previous era but still resourced at glory day levels”? She also wants us to pivot in the way we do age-old processes. “Remote working clearly offers opportunities to rebalance fixed costs.”

“I think what happens a lot is that you say these things are important, but you aren’t really following it in leadership with your actions,” said Anita Zielina, director of news innovation and leadership at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. “Then you have to really be willing to invest or shift money into building a product team. So it’s really kind of a transformation process than anything else, unless you’re building as a start-up. Of this means you ask yourself, ‘What can I stop doing to shift those resources into something else?’”

3. Your culture is unfrozen. There will never be a better time to change it. “Culture is incredibly efficient—it works as an internal protocol that silently influences actions and decisions,” Kueng writes. “Ensure digital voices (often younger and more diverse) have equivalent ‘voice time’ and that they are heard first… The pandemic has broken cultural inertia. Habits have been unbroken. People are expecting things to be different. This is really rare. Now is the time to make your culture into what you want it to be. The trick is to layer culture change objectives into everything else you are doing,”

This will take direct involvement from all staff, especially leaders. At AM&P 2020, keynote speaker Leslie Mac told a great story about a university where she helped conduct some diversity workshops. The heads of the department told her, “We want to spend time with you.” And she said, “That’s great, we’re all going to the workshop.” That was not in the department heads’ plans. “I stopped them,” she said. “’You have to come to the workshop, too.’ They looked at me with [deer-in-the-headlights] eyes. ‘There’s no way unless you come. You need to be there, you need to participate.’ They were really afraid of saying the wrong thing, of being uncomfortable. They came up to me after: ‘I never had this kind of conversation with staff and graduate students. The walls came down. Thank you.’ We can’t silo this kind of work.”

4. Take extravagant care of your teams. “Remote working is often a boon for productivity when tasks are known. [But] it is bad for innovation and setting up new things (and finding a workaround for this is the challenge right now)… Ramp up communication as much as possible. Gather everyone together more often. Remind them that they are part of a cohesive organization.”

Early on in the pandemic, Dan Fink, managing director of Money-Media, told me something that turned out to be prescient. “Since the pandemic isn’t expected to end anytime soon, we have ordered kits for a number of staff who were having difficulty being efficient in their home work space; things like a mouse, keyboard, monitor, office chair, etc. Most of these items are pretty inexpensive on amazon.com but go a long way to helping staff be productive and letting people know how much we appreciate their hard work during this crisis.”

5. Timing is the rarest of strategic skills. Now is the time. “Agility, innovation, optimism—these were the most critical traits for now, according to 22 CEOs surveyed in September 2020. This is a rare reset moment. COVID-19 has been a crisis on so many levels but it is also a huge opportunity: to rethink, to innovate, to shed things that need to be let go of, and to build for the future.”