 Good afternoon and thank you for joining today's webinar, the Industry Associations Matter in 2014. Today's webinar is presented by Brenda Mainland from Survey Matters, who are experts in stakeholder research. I would now like to pass it on to her. How are you today, Brenda? I'm well, thank you. Iza, how are you? Good, thank you. Good. Okay, let's get started. Firstly, thank you to everybody who registered into attending this webinar today. We're really excited to be bringing you these results. They are literally hot off the press. We only got the results out to the participating associations yesterday, so they really are quite fresh and new. Today we're just going to run through a little bit of our study and then look at some of the high-level numbers around how associations are performing and the sorts of services and functions that members value from their membership. And also then we'll take a look at what associations can do about it. Now we've left plenty of time for questions and discussion at the end, so the presentation should only take around 30 minutes or so. There is certainly a lot of time for us to answer any questions that you may have. Let's talk a little bit about the study. We had 17 associations taking part in the research, and those who provided their consent for their name to be published are listed here. And firstly I want to really sincerely thank everybody who took part without their willingness to come together and collaborate and to ask their members to take part in this survey. We'd still be guessing at benchmarks for industry sector and what members were thinking. I'd also like to thank the Australasian Society of Association Executives, or OSA, for their support and promotion of these benchmark studies that we conduct. We are really grateful for all the support that they provide us and they're a fabulous resource for us. I'd also again like to thank Redbat Conferencing for hosting this webinar today. It's really good to be able to get out to as many people as possible with these findings. We had a great response to this survey with over 1,700 respondents, and I guess despite our reservation that the response rate percentage might be lower than that of the corresponding professional association research that we did last year, 16% was exactly the same as the professional association. So it does seem that industry association members do want to have their say. So what did we ask members? I guess from as per the professional association research, we really wanted to test member satisfaction with current services being provided by their association and to understand more about what services your members value. We also ask ourselves all the time what will the industry association of the future look like. It's a area of research that we really are keen to explore, but we knew that before we do that we needed to understand what members were thinking about their industry association or industry body now in 2014. Do members think there's an ongoing role for industry associations? Do members value the service that's currently provided by their association? How do they rate their association's performance? And do they want to be more involved in the activities of their industry body? This report of these questions informs the opening chapter of what we hope will be an ongoing discussion with associations and their members. So firstly, how do associations perform? What do members think about the current value they obtain from longing? These slides are just a snapshot of their thoughts and what they tell us. Obviously we can't go into everything that we researched in a one hour webinar, but hopefully you'll get the gist of their overall feelings from this. And of course we'll be able to tell you how to get a copy of the results at the conclusion of this presentation. We asked members to rate their satisfaction and the question was exactly that overall, can you rate your satisfaction with your membership of whatever the association name was? Only 58% selected satisfied or extremely satisfied. And of that only 15% selected extremely satisfied. And we think that this is a really low number and quite worrying. And whilst we know that overall satisfaction isn't the be-all and end-all, it does provide a gauge of how members are feeling. And to give you some comparison, in the professional association research last year, the response to the same question was 73%. It doesn't compare well really. It seems there might be some work to do. And if we look into the components of the services that associations provide, it doesn't actually get much better. The exception of the quality of member services, that's the general information, customer service and support that it provides. Only 51% of members thought that they were good or excellent. And even with the 53% that the events of professional development resources were good or excellent, 58% that overall communications were good or excellent. So they're not fantastic numbers by any stretch of the imagination. And unfortunately it actually gets worse. Participation is extremely low. So whilst 90% of your members read your newsletter, and you would hope that that would be the case, because that is after all where most of the information that they're seeking, the information you want to provide them comes from. Only 47% in conference and only 25% have taken part in professional development with their association. And to cap it all off, promotion is very poor. A minus 7 net promoter score means that more members are likely to speak negatively about their membership to others than those who would actively recommend. The professional associations for this same question was a positive 2. And again that's not a great score, but obviously it is a little better than the industry body. Word of mouth is a very strong driver of growth, and so this figure is rather alarming. Ideally you want your members speaking positively about membership and their experiences and also about the association. So the challenge is to get this number into the positive. And of course, and amongst all of this, there were associations with positive net promoters, but correspondingly there were those with worse scores. And so to an extent I guess it's up to each individual association to understand and identify their score. So we've looked at the high level numbers of how members think their associations perform. Let's turn our attention to what members want. What's important to them and what do they value? Firstly, let's look at the common functions that associations perform. It's important that associations understand the benefits that the services members expect their association to provide and how effectively members think that the associations are providing those services. You do need to monitor the difference between the importance and effectiveness of the service provision. So to help do that, Survey Matters conduct strategic gap analysis on most of the membership surveys that we provide. We find it's a very useful way to help ensure associations are aligning their competencies with the needs of their members. So to do this, the survey asks the members to identify how important the various services provided by their association are to them. And then ask them to rate their satisfaction with their association in providing those services. Those are calculated for both the importance and performance dimensions and then compared to ascertain the difference between the two. And we refer to this as the performance gap. So as you can see here, the white column are members' rating of important or critical of the particular function. I hope you can all see the functions along the bottom there. So information and advocacy obviously are very important to members as our events and industry regulations benchmarking, those sorts of things. And the blue column here tells you how satisfied the members are with your performance. And as you can see here, again, information rates rather well. Because perhaps not so much. So the areas have the largest gap between importance and performance indicate potential areas for corrective action. And where the associations might be able to focus their attention, their efforts for best return. So as you saw from the graph, there are a lot of areas to address and we are not going to be able to go into all of these today. We will concentrate on the two functions that members think are most important and those activities were information provision and advocacy. As well as the high importance ratings for those two activities, they also came across very strongly in the free text comments that members provided to us. So there are definitely two areas that matter the most to members. So firstly, with the importance of information rating at 98%, very pleasing to see that 80% of members think that their association keeps them up to date with industry issues. And most members think that information is provided in a suitable format, that it's relevant and that it is current and provided in a timely manner. And we know that members consume information. We saw earlier that 90% read the newsletters, 92% say that regular newsletters and communications are valuable to them and 87% report value from industry data, statistics and benchmarks. So those are good numbers and they actually do go to show that members both value and need those services. However, as we saw earlier with overall quality of communications at only 58%, it's clear there's some serious disconnect somewhere. Only 58% rated that the association's communications is good or excellent and further 61% rated the information services is good or excellent. So why is the discrepancy between figures that we've just seen and these ones? These days members are sophisticated consumers of news and information and there's so many competing sources of news and information out there. In all of our research that we do, members repeatedly tell us the things that they want. They want a variety of communication mediums. They want to be able to choose how they consume their news. Sometimes they want webinars. They might want any other time, sometimes blogs, sometimes journals. And they actually want to contribute. They want to be able to share their ideas with their association and they want to provide their feedback to you. Of course information and segmentation is important and information needs to be targeted to specific interests. Members all have specialties or areas that they are particularly interested in and appealing to these interests will encourage greater participation and consumption of your information. And lastly, it needs to be interesting and engaging. Need to catch their attention. If you can create that interesting and engaging comment, you can talk about it and they show it to their colleagues. So it builds your reputation and builds your brand really. It's all part of that word of mouth positive recommendations that we talked about earlier. So let's look at advocacy. As we saw earlier, advocacy was the second most important activity that members of value at 96% of them thought that it was important or critical. And 65% of members are satisfied with their association's advocacy efforts which is not a great score but we need to temper that that in all of the research that we conduct, advocacy scores are always lower regardless of the association type. It doesn't matter whether they're a professional association or an industry body. Advocacy is an intangible thing and it's almost an invisible service. There's always so much more to be done and trade-offs to be made. It's very rare to have all of your recommendations, points or efforts on a particular topic or subject except at 100% by the authority that you're a lobbying. But in Maine, association lobby groups, they represent their industry or profession to government and regulatory body and lobbying and advocacy are what associations traditionally have been all about. Which is why it's quite alarming to see that only 45% of members think that their association has strong government contacts that benefit the industry. Now regardless of whether the association or you think that you actually do have those good government contacts, your members' perceptions are that you don't. So again, this is an area for examination for industry association. Okay, so we've looked at some of the important functions and how members rate performance now in 2014. So what can you do about it? Where should you be focusing? And what other insights do we know that may be able to help you? It's been really interesting that she had conducted this research because it corresponds to a lot of research coming out of the United States at the moment. The difference is that ours is from a member's perspective, so we're surveying members, and in the USA they are a researching association executive, so they're looking at it from the association's perspective. And so bringing them together produces some really interesting insights. In the USA the researchers found that associations who understand their members and who understand their members up at night issues have better performance than associations that don't. The associations whose management and boards are strategically focused who have a high level of understanding of members' needs and who regularly seek feedback from their members, have better retention, increasing revenues, higher attendance at conference, and more timely membership renewals over a three-year period. Now before we go on, I'd just like to launch a quick poll here. So either if you could just pop that up, and I'm just asking people to answer these questions as best they can, or this quick question. Started now? So I'm interested in understanding how many of you think that your association has a really good understanding of your members' needs. So yes, you're always understanding and seeking feedback. You think you do, are you not sure, or no, you don't really know what's keeping the members up at night. Okay, so we're still going there, but the majority of you, and certainly the vast majority, 88% think that you have a pretty good handle on your members' issues and challenges, or you definitely have a really good handle on your issues and challenges. Thanks. Either way, that's probably done for now. To carry on with that, we decided to test the premise with members in the association's matter research. So there was a question in the survey that said, thinking about the association name, how much do you agree that management of the association understands the needs of members? 65% of members agree or strongly agreed with that statement. And of those 65%, a staggering 95% were satisfied or extremely satisfied with their membership. So if members perceive that their association understands them, understands their needs, and understands their up at night issues, they are far more likely to report satisfaction and engagement. And remember, this compares to only 58% of members across the overall study reporting satisfaction. So whilst this doesn't imply causation necessarily, it certainly does suggest a strong correlation between association's understanding their members and member satisfaction and engagement. Now, satisfaction scores for each individual association who took part in the study range from 20% through to 83%. So obviously, associations need to examine their own individual results. It's interesting that only 65% of members agreed that their associations understand their needs. And as we'll see in the coming slides, for associations to remain relevant and viable into the future, understanding members' day-to-day needs, and challenges will be an essential requirement for association executives and their board. So what are the major challenges that members face? Obviously, these will all be different for each association, and it very much depends on the type of industry. So all associations need to understand the unique challenges and issues that members face, and it's a critical part of your ongoing success. We ask members to write their top three major challenges that they face from a relatively trick list. And 62% of them selected cost pressures as one of their top three. And this is very similar to the professional association research who also rated cost pressures in the top three. And it was also most often identified in the free text comments. We did an analysis of that free text feedback, and that indicates that the source of the cost pressures is really multi-dimensional. Some members mentioned the high cost of compliance to regulations. A large number of members mentioned the pressure that unqualified operators put on their ability to remain profitable. That a lack of industry standards, perhaps, and accreditation enabled those unqualified operators to provide a poorer quality service but at a lower cost. And so they're enforcing the qualified operators to reduce their own prices to remain competitive. And I think these are things that associations can help with. Lobbying to reduce the high costs of compliance, developing, maintaining, and enforcing industry standards and best practice, and educating the public about the risks of poor quality workmanship and unqualified operators are also things that associations traditionally have done. Unfortunately, though, only 19% of members thought that their association was effectively able to help them with the challenge. In fact, the challenges that members ranked in their top three were all issues that members did not think their association was effectively able to assist with. So as we'll see, these are the things that need to be addressed for industry bodies and indeed for all associations to thrive into the future. So where to from here? Is there an ongoing need for industry bodies? I guess this has been the subject of much debate and caricature over recent years. Member numbers are declining. Social media is taking over from traditional association activities. Younger members don't participate. These are all the things that we hear often when we're talking. But is this right? Will the association actually survive? Or will we certainly think that they will? And as it turns out, so do most members. 91% thought that the need for industry associations will either increase or stay the same. And this is roughly the same as the professional association study where 95% thought the need would be greater. And the reasons that why members think this way are all so interesting. So when we have a look at the analysis of the free text comments, these mostly point to members' concerns about regulation, increased competition, unqualified operators, and maintaining that for their industry, that the voice that the association gives them, both to government and advocacy and to the general public. So we actually believe that the time for industry association is now, that the focus on collaboration and community, that collaboration, crowd sourcing, and community are all the words that we're hearing now as business models of the future. And that is also the traditional role of the association. We think that in the rise of the collaborative economy, that the perfect fit with the value of opposition that associations actually deliver. And we think there's a great deal that can be done if the association can shift the focus in thinking service provision and pushing services out to members to actively planning strategies that provide outcomes for members, that provide help with their issues and their challenges, and that actively encourage member feedback, participation and involvement. I think that if you always do what you've always done, nothing's going to change. Members' numbers may decline as baby boomers retire. Younger members will simplify another way to collaborate, share or lobby. But I think those association executives and their boards, who are willing to engage in a different manner and to change the conversation with members from how satisfied were you with what we provided last week to, okay, what are your issues? How can we solve these problems together? I think they will enjoy growth. You'll enjoy growth and revenues in member numbers in attendance and in participation. So really that bridge to the end of this brief look at the results of the Association's matter study for industry bodies. Now I hope you've found this presentation interesting and informative. And certainly we're looking forward to continuing to work with you to bring this value to your members and to provide to bring revenue and membership growth for your association. So for more information, you can call or email or download a report or subscribe to our newsletter using these methods here. And I'd very much like to thank you for your time and attention today.