 Hello and welcome to another episode of Six Degrees of Association, the only online TV show that's dedicated to the pursuit of association success. I'm Sarah Gonzalez from Redback Conferencing and as usual the man sitting next to my left is Andrew McCullum from Association of Corporate Council Australia. Hello Sarah, how are you? We've lasted this long without Rob. Who would have thought? Sorry Rob, who? Yeah, exactly. Looking forward to another jam-packed episode, we're probably at 21 minutes 30 seconds now so I'd like to welcome another one of our guests for this season and her name is Wendy McWilliam from Research Australia and she's the Strategic Communications Manager there. How are you Wendy? Good, thank you Sarah. Great to have you. Hello Wendy, good to have you. Thanks Andrew. I feel like I'm in the middle, because you guys know each other so much. I'm afraid as well. Yeah, exactly, so I'll try and keep up guys. I don't want the team down. Shouldn't be too many insight actually. Yeah. So before we get into it and before we start peppering you, let's get straight over to Andrew with your thumbs up for this fortnight. Thanks Sarah. I have to give a thumbs up for me is highlighting the fantastic work of the Asia Pacific Incentives and Meeting Expo. Very recently they celebrated or delivered their 25th and biggest annual conference to date. This is a huge event in Melbourne that attracts delegates from the meetings, from the event sectors, from all over the world and four and a half thousand delegates at this year's event. Wow. That's a decent event. Had an amazing range of speakers, let me throw a few names at you Sarah. Holly Ransom, I'm sure we've all heard of. Ida Buttrows, Kirk Pangilli, you wouldn't know. No, showing my age. There used to be a band called in excess. So very impressive putting on an event of that size and well done to the hardworking team at AIME who no doubt already turned their minds on how to better that event in 2018. It would be good if they had some sort of a case study about how they got so many people to that event. And how it's obviously grown from something so much smaller. So thumbs down that leads me to many viewers. This has been unfortunate. Many viewers would have seen the stories about the class action being lodged against APCO group and what's termed sham contracting. That's hiring independent workers as contractors when they really are employees. So far this has been isolated to a single organization, albeit one that had staff working for multiple charities across Australia. But as part of the four per sector, this really is an appalling black eye for all of us and some of the directors of those organizations who were using APCO contractors, who were underpaid, who were exposed to very unfair workplace conditions. Some of these people are going to be shifting pretty nervously in their seats right now. So this is a big problem. As I say, unfortunately, it negatively impacts the entire sector. So as I say, a huge thumbs down to those involved. Unfortunately, the beneficiaries of those charities, they're the people that are going to be missing out. That is really dodgy. I know. And as I say, it's unfortunate that the broader sector gets dragged down with it, unfortunately. With every thumbs up, there's definitely a thumbs down. So back to the positive. My thumbs up, and last episode, for those of you who joined, and Andrew, you remember we did speak to Damien from the ADA, amazing panellists regarding governance. And there was a lot of talk around that. This time, I'd like to give a thumbs up to the Australian Institute of Superannuation, trustee, so AIST. They've developed a new governance code that reinforces the importance of member representation on the boards of superannuation funds. So that's great. But what's even better, they've developed this code. They've actually sent that draft code to their membership for their feedback and their consultations. That applies to more than 50 profit to member funds, which is great because it shows they care about their feedback and what they have to say. And I really love this quote from their CEO, Tom Garcia. You can't sound by it to good governance. It doesn't come down to one factor. Good governance is fundamentally about a group of people making good decisions, having the right skills, and also having a strong commitment to the members they serve. And I think that just sums it up. I think it's great. They've done something great, but then they're going to their members for feedback. And back in March, I was actually at the AIST conference and amazing conference up in the Gold Coast. You just really got that sense there as well that they actually do care about their members. And yeah, I just think they're doing really well as an association. Yeah. It'd be fascinating to see just sort of what level of feedback, how many other members do provide that feedback. And that's the sense of engagement, isn't it? Exactly. It's engaging with members and seeing just what they are, how engaged they are in the process. So yeah, some credit to them. And thumbs down. So one word, sponsorship. Now, not that sponsorship in itself is a negative. I don't want to get into this too much, but I do feel like associations tend to sell themselves short when it comes to sponsorship. So they're either too scared to ask. Some people don't know what exists, especially within the online world. So people running online events. And they really sometimes don't even ask for as much as what they were. So we see this a lot. You look at even online events as all this white space, people have the ability to go out and to use it for sponsorship. And then when you talk to them about it, like I said, there's this idea that, you know, oh, I don't know if we could get that much. Or I don't know if we could really do this. I just feel like associations really need to stand up and realize that people are willing to pay good money to reach their members and go out and ask for it. Because if you don't ask for it, you don't know, but don't sell yourself short. What are your thoughts on this? Because you're in communications. So I'd be interested to see your experience, not only within Research Australia, but in your previous roles, Wendy. The sponsorship for online events, webinars, webcasts, it's the unknown knowledge. Within associations, sometimes we lack that knowledge of how the breadth of the audience. We look at our members and so we've got 8,000 members. Our online community is that 8,000 members where you and I know that it's not. It's quadruple that. It's a spiderweb, but it continues to grow and grow and grow. So yeah, it's frustrating, but they should be definitely upselling everything to do with online sponsorship. Maybe we should be helping people get knowledge out there as opposed to just winging on it on thumbs down. I'll take that task on. Let's look at that for a future guest spot on this show. Yeah, possibly. So with that out the way, thumbs up, thumbs down. Thank you so much for your input. Thank you. We are going to turn our attention to our special guest back to you, Wendy. So first of all, you've been with Research Australia for just a short while. Can you tell us a little bit about them and what they do? Very short while, actually, Sarah. So Research Australia, I guess our purpose is to make health and medical research the high priority for government, for the consumers in the community, and for those doing the research. So this is very different to science. Health and medical within our association. We traditionally represent a really broad spectrum. It's the universities, it's the health and medical research institutes. It's also the corporate health corporates, so Telstra Health have a huge facet. They're actually one of our foundation members, Bupa, and then even the private sector. So you've got the pharmaceutical companies, they're our members, so we wear many hats. The way we push our story is through advocacy. We have two team members that go to Parliament and talk to Parliamentary members about our cause. Nice. And that's putting health and medical research on them. So much bigger. Yeah, definitely. It's huge. Wow. So I mean, you're the strategic communications manager at Research Australia, as you say. Now, what does that mean to you? So from a membership communications, you're talking about big organisations. What does that mean at that communication? How are you communicating to those members? And growing your members, no doubt. So it's a different association to, I guess, my previous groups that I've worked for. So we represent organisations within that organisations. We have individual, they're not members, they're individual contacts, I guess. So I'll give you one example. Monash University is one of our organisational members. Within that organisation is 61 members. Okay. So they're really engaged with us. So I'm actually communicating to 61 members from the Dean to the 2IC researcher. Wow. So it's pretty hard to segment your communication pieces. Is it based on job title? Is it based on location? Is it based on which part of the sector they represent? And it's a struggle that I'm trying to work through right now, Andrew. So any suggestions are great. But it is difficult, really difficult. Is there broad membership? But also our weakness is how do you target those specific audiences? So that's obviously the challenge is the Dean is talking a different language to the 2IC down the bottom. So what do you do in terms of what are your communication channels to your members? I guess the top end of town, it's our board. So we had our board meeting last week and it was the first time I got to experience this high calibre of 15 people in a room. We can communicate directly one on one with that group because that's how we engage with our members. The other people, we don't run events as such. So apart from an awards dinner, which I think a lot of associations do. So at the end of the year we do an awards dinner, which really focuses on that individual upcoming researcher. But generally I think it's just through a variety of different tools. Online submissions plus our Inspire magazine, which is a quarterly magazine, e-newsletters and e-mail, EDMs and etc. Just on that because we spoke about in the past when we had Gillian, or Gillian and I think Trisha as well. And Andrew mentioned the take up of digital as opposed to the hard copy. Where do you sit on that? Are you a fan of both? Do you send, you know, where does your association and yourself sit? Oh, reps. There was a magazine back at Fitness Australia that was just hard copy and we became both. Now I'm working with just online, digital. The uptake is huge. The contributors are our members. I send out a call for contributors. I filled my magazine within four weeks. The deadline was two weeks ago. I didn't chase one contributor, but I am working with academics. So that is something they really work towards. They love that deadline and they love contributing and talking about what their work is. I really like online. I like flip books. I like being able to click through to URLs. I want to explore, go deeper into that article. I want to be stimulated also by images. And I think our members do as well, no matter where they're from. So you've got obviously, Wendy, your breadth of association experience is large and diverse. What are you seeing from a member engagement point of view that you think is something that more people should be taking up? That we probably need to scrap the tick box. So that tick box of features and benefits of members. I represent organizations now. My previous organization was representing individuals. Both had tick boxes. One was $50 per person. I'm now working with $5,000 to $50,000 memberships. Both had tick boxes. How does that even cut across? How do I contribute $50,000 because I get more ticks than someone who's contributing $1,500? Get rid of that. You can work with features and benefits looking at the individual stakeholder. That's my advice. And you're also involved as well as Research Australia with another organization, Wings of Hope. Can you just tell us a little bit more about that and how people can get involved because it's a great cause? Yeah, thank you, Sarah. So I'm a founder of Wings of Hope, which is a not-for-profit association as well, looking at those bereaved by suicide. We were set up by the bereaved community and we now have a resource called Red Chocolate Elephants. It's a printed resource with a DVD, a little bit old score, but we're looking at changing that. To digital? To digital totally because it's targeting under 10-year-olds. Wow. So they probably want to look at it at their iPad and listen to the audio. And what we're doing, our project this year is to distribute that Red Chocolate Elephant resource into every primary school nationally. So you can definitely show your support by going on our website, which is wingsofhope.org.au. Excellent. Wow. So nationally, that's going nationally. Oh, nationally. It's going nationally. That's fantastic. 33,000 primary schools in Australia. Yep. So we've done 1,000. We're getting there. Baby steps. Yeah. So you mentioned the board. So does your board actually engage with your members? And if they do, how do they do that? Well, all our board represent members. So the way to engage with members, and I guess one of the strategies is to grow your membership is for them to promote membership. Okay. So I was thinking after our board meeting last week is why don't we do an NPS to our board? So we send in a promoter score out to all our board members, because if they're not referring the association that they're part of onto their peers and or leaders of the organizations, then how do we continue to grow? We don't want them to be detractors. We want them to be promoters. So you can really leverage your board, especially when you look at that room of high-caliber people. They've got the members behind them. Is that quite common in your experience, Andrew? Have you ever been part of something like that? That's a great question. I mean, there's often boards that are sort of consisting of people that are elected by members. So are, in fact, members. And then there are those that are appointed who aren't. You know, sometimes I've seen there's a disconnect between the appointed directors as opposed to, you know, representing the members and those that are elected. So the elected members tend to want to engage with the members because they want to get re-elected at the end of their term. But it's a challenge to sort of get that steady, regular involvement, certainly. So if you can do it at Research Australia, I'm keen to hear some tips on how you did it, that's for sure. Absolutely. All right. And when to your sort of, again, from an association's background, Karen, what is it about the associations that keeps you in the sector? That we get to look at organizations and work out the need. So if they can't do something themselves, how can we help them? And also if they can, the association can probably do it better. You know, creating that alliance, building that group together to sort of go forward to the government or to get discounts on utilities, et cetera. Yeah. That's my purpose in life with associations. Yeah. Well, it looks like you're enjoying it and you're doing great work on both ends of the spectrum. Thank you. So thanks so much. Thanks very much, Andrew. Now, as always, we want you to stick around because I think you're going to be very proud of Andrew for this next segment. So as always, every fortnight, we ask Andrew to go around through the internet, find the most obscure association he can find, and then bring it to us to showcase the amazing work they're doing. So what do you have for us today? Thanks, Sarah. And on that, I'm still waiting for the reimbursement of my travel expenses too if you can check into that. But thank you, that. And as our viewers will know of the last couple of weeks we've certainly been to North America. We went to Iceland. Have you booked your holiday yet? Oh, you went to Iceland. Yeah, where'd you go this time? But we're back in Australia now and very pleased to talk about the Australian Miniature Enthusiasts Association. That's right, the AMEA, as I like to call them. Miniature people? Let me finish. Okay, sorry. This is my seat. The AMEA, thinking miniature doll houses, miniature furnishings that go into miniature doll houses and so forth, miniature life fittings, if you will. I'm making an assumption about that last point. But the AMEA has some very, very worthy aims. Let me read a couple of to you. Promote the hobby of miniature making and collecting. Very important. The share of miniature-related information in a non-competitive forum. Raising capital to undertake such tasks and provide advice and assistance to clubs that do miniatures and publish a newsletter three times a year. So to top that all off, if you find yourself in Hobart later this year around the end of September, you might be able to come along to the Miniature Enthusiasts Association hosted by the Miniature Enthusiasts of Tasmania. And that's a scary thought because there's obviously a lot of state-based miniature enthusiasts out there. So there you have it, the AMEA doing excellent work in their chosen field. All the very best to them. Great to be able to feature them on this segment. And will you be going to Tasmania or is this something we need to start a GoFundMe page to make sure that we can get you there because you see a little bit or about it, to be honest. That's a fantastic idea, yes. You can go to this website and make a donation and I'll happily report on it for a future episode. www.wingsofhope.com.au Something like that instead. Maybe you can decide where your money's better spent. Excellent. Well, there's our two-minute warning. Who would have thought? That happens so quickly, doesn't it? So just on that, this is a time where we can actually go back, look at the last episode we had and also share the feedback that we've actually received from you guys regarding last week's feedback as well. So any feedback from you this time around? Well, one thing it's probably worthy of mentioning now and great news is that we are pleased to announce that you and I and a, as yet to be known, guest will be doing another live show at the Aussie, the Ace Convention this year. So the negotiations have happened. They've been mostly, mostly good-natured. So Brendan and the team are inviting us back. So that's fantastic. And that's on May 11th and 12th here in Sydney. So really looking forward to that. Yeah. And we're going to have an open panel. So we don't really know who we're going to have on there yet. So if anyone would like to put an application forward, we don't have a process, but just feel free to get in touch and we'll go from there. Highly unlikely Brendan will put his hand up because I think after last year. That's a challenge, Brendan. We're looking for you. Yes, we are. Well, thank you on that note. Thank you, Andrew. As always, great to be sitting beside you and getting through all the segments that we so much love. And also thank you, Wendy. Like I said, it looks like you're doing some great work and great, you know, showing some other associations out there, your tips and your advice within the comm sector. Anytime. Great to have you here, Wendy. Good talk. Thanks. Yeah, and any future feedback, good or bad, anything else you want to tell us or let us know, feel free to hashtag 6DA. Also go to 6degreesofassociation.com to watch previous episodes and also future episodes. That's where you'll find them. And also associationsuccess.org. There's also some great information there that you can find. Thanks again. Join us next time when we're speaking to Lee Tonito, CEO of the Australian Marketing Institute. Thanks again. And remember, too much conversation always kills the chat. Bye for now.