Your Tech Stack Is Losing You Members. Here's What to Actually Fix

Some people don't love change. Yeah, I would say in my experience, most people don't love change what I'm like. We're going to change it there, like a lot of stuff, stuff. And I'm like, it's going to be great, I promise, I promise.

Welcome to the marketing team of one podcast where we have conversations about the issues one person marketing teams face when trying to meet their goals with limited time and budgets. Now here's your hosts, Eric and Mike. Welcome back to the marketing team of One podcast. We are blessed to have with us today, Miss Touda Bentatou, who works at Novi AMS.

She is an expert in association management, IT marketing technologies around a lot of association stuff. She's got a great background and just wanted to welcome you to the show. Thanks for being on today. Awesome. Thanks for having me, Eric. I'm excited to be here. We're going to talk a little bit about marketing tech stacks and how they work within an association or other small organizations today.

Give us some of your background on what qualifies you to talk about a lot of these high tech topics that we'll address today? Sure. Let's use expert a little loosely. I want to be a self-proclaimed expert, but I guess I just have a lot of background and experience with tech in general and in the association space. So a little bit about myself.

I currently work for Novi AMS, where I oversee new customer onboarding, but prior to that I worked in the association space for about six years and an organization called Site or California IT and education. My role there was the director of Member Experience. So I oversaw membership and member engagement, marketing our events and our corporate affiliate program. So I had the tech background before and then also had the Marketing Membership Association background too.

And then prior to that I was a member of site. So I have a really interesting association journey. So I was a member, active volunteer presenter at the conferences, things like that. But my role as a member when I worked in education was the IT analyst for the Irvine Unified School District. So my role was doing a lot of project management, developing our project management office and educating our team.

Who were, we like to call them, accidental project managers on how to manage their own technical projects as well. But in terms of where there's the intersection of marketing tech, all of that, I have a very non-linear career path. So my degree is actually in public relations. And I started my career working, working in marketing and public relations, and even worked for a digital publishing company at a college doing marketing.

Never honestly thought I would land in tech. When I was in college doing PR and marketing, I was like, this is what I'll do for the rest of my life. But you know, you're young and dumb and don't know what you don't know. You find out these things interest you and you're like, cool, we're going to just explore this and you end up being a huge nerd and loving the technical side of things.

Yeah, and I think that marketing relies so heavily now on technology that, you know, I want to focus more on the show a lot more speaking to some of this, because I think it helps amplify the efforts of marketing teams of one and people who are that one person who does the marketing. They can utilize a lot of technology to get the solutions and the performance that they need from their communications and their outreach, which is really important for associations.

Absolutely. And I think being in associations, a lot of the time, you're the single person marketing team. I mean, it's marketing, the marketing team of one podcast, even for small businesses, or sometimes you don't even have a marketing background. Right? Because in associations, its membership and marketing. So to be able to do it all, you kind of need to have some of that tech stack to lean on to help you do it.

Otherwise, you know, it's I mean, it's it's tough in general to do it all in those roles where you have membership and marketing because traditionally those are those are two different things. Right. And but you kind of just go with what you have. And if you can implement some of the tools to help, it can make it a lot easier to do more and make sure you're investing in the right places.

It's been great to get to know you. And we we met each other. You were working on a project. We were doing some rebranding work for Associations West, and you were on their advisory board and helped guide that project from their side of the table, which I thought your feedback was incredible and really helpful for the whole project.

So that was one of the big reasons that we also wanted to have you on the show, was just to speak more about your background and knowledge, because you really came to the table prepared and understood the importance of what the project was and the goals we were trying to achieve. So I love that insight from you. You've been in the association space for a while.

You've worked in association technology for a while. Let's talk a little bit about some of the challenges within that space, because there's a lot of options out there for people to choose. And not that we're talking about choosing one platform or promoting one idea, but let's talk a little bit about the challenges that you're faced when, let's say your executive director wants to either make a change or wants to improve things and maybe get involved in signing up for an AMS service.

What are the things that we need to be concerned about or look for during that process? Yeah, I think, you know, at the core of it, for an association, the AMS is really the heart of your organization. So it's really important to get something that's the right fit for you. I think a lot of the challenges come with budgetary, obviously, you know, money is always a factor when you're picking a solution for your organization.

I think to knowing where to start can be really daunting, especially if you've never done a project of this size. A lot of the time it's a big lift and I think it gets underestimated a lot, and plus it gets thrown on top of everything else. They're already here, right? We've already talked about how it's membership and marketing, so you already have a lot in your day to day.

So making sure that you carve that time to do the project can be a challenge for a lot of organizations too. So I think sometimes it even gets put off because it's like, now's not a good time, now's not the right time. But it's almost I always tell people, because especially when working in project management, a lot of the time we get that now's not the right time.

But I always tell people to stop and look at what you're doing. If you're doing a lot of things manually day to day, if you have a good piece of technology in place that can automate some of that, that time is going to be you're going to get that time back. So if you can stop, take a look and evaluate at what you're doing and see how you can improve it.

Taking the time to implement these systems is worth it. If you can make the right choice, which we can get into that, because making the right choice to begin with is tough. So for all software selection, whether it be an AMS email marketing tool, I always tell people to start with what you need, right? I always tell people to make a requirements list in three buckets.

So what's a non-negotiable? Like what is the minimum things that you need your piece of software to do? We can use the AMS as an example. A lot of the time where you can start with that is the minimum of what your AMS is currently doing. So, you know, I need to be able to or for my members to have a place where they can log in and access and renew their membership, things like that.

And then the second bucket is this is really nice to have. We have some pain points or paper cuts in our current system. We want to be able to automate these or find a better way to do it in our new system. This is our nice to have, but is it necessarily a non-negotiable? And then the third bucket is this probably doesn't exist, but let's add it on the list in, you know, the one off chance that a system has it.

But maybe they're not scored as highly as buckets one and two, because what I'll typically tell people to do is create a rubric as well, because the next piece I'll often recommend is for them to go and actually evaluate software and more than one piece of software, because I think what happens is people see successes of other organizations with a piece of software.

But the problem is you're different from that organization. You don't have the same needs. It's that organization. So you really need to take the time to figure out what matters for you. And I'll admit, like, it's a lot of work, it's not easy to go through and do this. But if you put the time in at the beginning, you're going to end up with a better solution in the long run, or find something that matches your needs the closest.

So then typically what I'll recommend. Once you have your requirements, I'll typically tell people to have a rubric where you score it 0-1-2-3, 0 means that functionality doesn't exist in the system. When you do the demo, one is like it's there, but it's not that great. Two is acceptable, three is this is great. And as you're going through your demo and I'll usually provide if, if I'm, you know, demoing several systems, I'll provide this list of questions to them ahead of time and say like this is what I'm looking for.

Show me in our demo how you can do this and that as they're going through. And a lot of times if you provide it to them ahead of time, like they'll go in the order that you want them to, you can just start scoring and at the end you kind of go back, especially because when you start to do 4 or 5 of these, they start to blend together.

You're like, I can't remember that this system do this or did this system do that? So once if you have it documented like that, you can go back and actually score it and see which one, you know, met your needs the best based on how you scored it. And it depending on how you want to do it to like you can add weights to certain things like in category one where it's a non-negotiable or something like that, or category two where it's nice to have.

You can add weights to things and kind of figure out how you want to calculate your rubric, but I think having that foundation in place when you're selecting your software really helps you find the best piece that actually meets the needs of what you're trying to accomplish for your organization. Well, you know, this sounds like a lot of work to do.

I don't want to do that. That's I'm busy. Okay. Is there do we have to go into AMS? Is that really I mean, just to kind of back up a little bit more. I'm wondering I know that AMS has make a lot of things easier, but they're also hard to integrate. You're on the front lines of that. You do customer.

Is it onboarding or is it you literally are helping them integrate this into their association at your current role. Correct? Yeah, I have a team under me that actively does the onboarding, but I oversee like our process, for example. And then obviously if customers, you know, are running into things where they're like, we're not sure how to approach this situation, I'll jump on a lot of those calls and help act as a, you know, a guide.

We do get a lot of, you know, we have this system over here that's not inherent in Novi. How do we make this work? And we can either provide the ways that Novi can help. And, you know, we have a pretty robust API. So we have a lot of vendors that have built integrations with Novi, but we also integrate with tools like Zapier.

So you can automate a lot of things on your own as well. And we have, you know, a lot of our customers who have done some amazing work and have shared that with our customers as well. So, I mean, I think that's I know we talked a little bit about this before, but I think people get really intimidated by technology, but especially with AI, like things like Claude and ChatGPT, if you just tell it what you're trying to do and say, like, I'm using Zapier, I want to automate this.

Like it can help you and create a step by step guide for you on how to do it. And I think I mentioned when I was talking about my background, I never in a million years thought I would end up in tech because I was like, I'm not technical, even though, I mean, like I was one of those people where computers were newer as I was growing up.

Like we had one very early in my household, my like my family, all my dad, you know, did some computer certifications and stuff. So like it was something that was around. But I used it more for, you know, AOL Instant Messenger and the fun stuff. Not necessarily the tactical stuff. Yeah, exactly. But Myspace is how I learned to code.

And I always share that story with people like, you know, when you start, you don't realize you kind of got to make it fun. And the result is my glitter comments on Myspace. But I didn't realize I was building my skills to my technical skills, learning how to code HTML. So I think at the core people get really intimidated.

But I think now more than ever, it's so easy to learn how to use tech, even as someone who isn't a developer doesn't know how to code. Well, that's what's great about AI is it's the tech teaching you how to use the tech know. And that's something that we've been missing. And I think that's what everybody's getting so excited about.

And well, as I've mentioned before, we're going to just include like the AI corner of what color or something every episode. Now we're going to have to talk about AI because it just it does so much for people who are overstressed and live in a chaotic work environment where there's a lot of demands, maybe on just you as one resource.

Right. So so you've got a lot of backgrounds. Do more people come from and where they're going with doing these integrations into your specific Novi AMS? But like I was asking before, I mean, is there do we have to use an AMS or where's the point where it's like, okay, now you're big enough or you have enough tasks to put together, you know, a research committee around integrating an AMS into your system?

I'm going back to like, yeah, simple. Like we're four people in an office and now all of a sudden we've got a thousand more members to manage or, you know, where is that point where people really need to think like, oh, gosh, now we need an arms. That's a great question. And we have quite a few customers who come from or come to us like where they're not migrating from an existing AMS, they just have spreadsheets.

So they reach that threshold where they're like, we've just been managing everything manually and now we're now it will make sense for us to have an AMS choosing the right product. It depends. Right. Because it depends on your association. It depends on your budget. It depends on a lot of things. But I think the things to consider for what the future looks like for your organization.

If you're in this growth phase and you're like, we're going to continue on this path, then yeah, I think most definitely it makes sense to make these investments because if you're just managing everything through spreadsheets, sure, you have a member list, but at the core of it, that's all it is. You still have to you don't have anywhere necessarily to document notes, or you don't have a way for them to log in and see their membership status.

That's a big thing too. Is the member experience? Sure, I can be a member of an organization, and I've been there. I've been a member of smaller organizations where I'm like, am I still a member? I don't think I've paid in over a year. I never got a renewal, so I don't I was like, I don't think I'm a member, and I have to go proactively to the website.

A year and a half later when my membership is expired, and that's dues revenue that that organization has lost out on. So I think there are certain things like that where it's like, okay, how important is it to you to maintain this membership level or expand? Because I think that's going to be really important. Do you have the budget to do this?

Because I think that is a big thing, like when you go from a very small organization to, you know, a few hundred members, that there's kind of a tipping point. This one's a little tough because I think this is a tough question to answer, because I think it really does depend. Right. And like you could have 200 members, but that doesn't mean that you have the means to have an AMS yet.

Does that make sense? Like it's almost like if the money's going to a staff member, they may not have the money for the AMS. So I think that's where it's a little tough. But I think if you want to be able to actually track metrics and have data on your members, then yes, like you should, you should have an AMS as quickly as you can because you're going to get more out of it than just having a member list in a spreadsheet.

You're going to be able to run your renewals. You're going to be able to do event registrations. You're going to be able to do a lot more than what a spreadsheet can provide you. So if you really want to grow, it's important to have the tech to support that. Otherwise it's just going to create extra work. And especially if you are smaller, if you're a one person, like managing all that manually takes a lot of time, it's probably you're probably going to see the ROI pretty easily.

If you're a single person and you have no system and you want to implement an AMS. Yeah, it's an interesting kind of math problem to try to figure out, like not only resources and cost and putting that against opportunity costs, you know, and I'm doing all this stuff that the tech can probably automate and take care of like renewals.

That to me would be, you know, maybe make a priority list of like what is the biggest problems we're having and like with that. And maybe that's a good way to judge if it's a revenue issue or a recurring revenue type of a problem, that might be something where you can, because you can already kind of bite size into some of these association management systems.

Exactly. You don't have to like, eat the whole burger right on the first bite. Right. Most definitely. And we'll see that from time to time where some of our customers start with the smaller one and they've outgrown it, and then they come to us. So it's I think it I, I'm biased because I am a tech proponent where I would say yes, I think if you have a membership, you should have an AMS.

I think it makes sense. So that way you can actually a have data. I think, you know, I think we've talked about it a little bit on one on one. Eric, like data driven decision making is the number one thing for me. Like I will make it whenever I'm making any decision. I'm like, what data do I have at my disposal?

What data? Am I missing? And, you know, try and go based off of data that exists because I think if you're just kind of if you're guessing, right, we have all these biases that, you know, sometimes the voices we hear are the loudest voices. It's, oh, everyone's upset about this or everyone's upset about that. If you make decisions based on, you know, you have a couple board members complaining about something, guess what?

They may not represent the masses of your membership. So you need the data to make those decisions. And I think without having something where you can gather that data, it makes it really difficult to grow. That's a good point too. And it's like there's the level set, like, okay, let's just take care of the day to day. And then there's the next, which is reaching where you're like, okay, I really have to set some goals now to either grow or, you know, capitalize on better opportunities or serve my members better.

And we're talking very specifically about associations on this, because I think association management systems, AMS is really are obviously they're optimized for that. And that's that's where most of your background is depending on, you know, what you're doing, you could be losing out on non-dues revenue. You know, if a lot of AMS also include the CMS or the content management solution for the website, there's opportunities there.

You can use your website for ads, things like that. So I mean, and you can do that technically on a, on a, on a, just like a Wix site or a website. But there are certain features within AMS that you can't get or that are a little bit harder to find in things like a Wix site, like for example, at Novi we have directories, we have feature sponsors on the homepage that's directly tied into the database.

It's driven by the data. It's not driven by you going on a page and putting a logo of a sponsor on a sponsor page, like you, it's it's a directory or, you know, it's displayed on the page that links to their profile, where you can go and click on their profile and it displays all of their company information.

So it's just a much better way to display it first off. And it makes it really easy for it to to connect to your actual data. And then it helps, you know, if it's a sponsor or, or some sort of, you know, a vendor directory, for example. It's it can be a like a sponsorship opportunity of like, hey, if you want to get included on our directory, you have to pay us $100 a year on top of like your affiliate dues or something like that.

And people can pay you to be on this directory because they want access to your members. And that's additional revenue for your organization right there. So there are certain things, I think by not having an AMS that you might be missing out on in terms of revenue, ultimately, what does the top line Cadillac AMS system provide for? Is it everything?

I mean, does an AMS really literally like just handle like you just come into work, you push one button and then you kick back and then life is perfect and everything is being handled by the robots. Is that like, what are all the features in, like, the top line offerings of some of these AMS programs? I mean, they all differ quite a bit.

I think there are some commonalities across them. Obviously, you know the member management piece. So you have your database of member records. I think that at the core is is it a lot of them offer event management. So event registration, things like that a lot offer like a member portal. So outside of just the member database a member can log in on their own, sign up for membership on the website.

Some offer like built in online communities trying to think of what else. Some may offer some committee modules, maybe some awards modules. It really depends and differ software to software. I will say though, I very rarely look for a product that does it all because especially if there are players in the space that do it really well. So like if for example, when I worked at my association, we had an AMS and then we also had an online community platform because prior to that, I believe our AMS also had online communities built in, or I've seen ones that had online communities built in, but it wasn't the greatest or most developed piece of the AMS.

So we decided for our needs because our message board was one of our biggest member benefits. We had a really active membership that used our online community a lot. That was really important to us, so we wanted to make sure that we had a tool that could fit those needs. And then same with the event management. We used our AMS for our smaller events like webinars and stuff like that, but our conference had about 2000 attendees into 300 booth trade show because it was in the tech industry.

So we needed to use a third party platform for that. I know it's easy and convenient to have a system that does everything, but I think I told this, I've told this to you before like a I don't believe there's such a thing as a perfect piece of software. There's no piece of software that's ever going to be able to do every single thing that you needed to do.

Like, darn sure I know short of custom development, which even sometimes there are limitations there and it can be really pricey if the listeners take one thing away from this podcast, I would say figure out what you need because that's what it is. Don't make software purchasing decisions based on like these rash decisions like take your time, figure out what's important.

Figure out where your gaps are. Figure out where they need to be filled and find tools that can integrate based on that. So the takeaway is that there yes, there are comprehensive. And I'm assuming that education like there's a lot of like certification things that go into some of these associations to that we're knowledgeable. But I'm assuming that there's that could be part of some of these AMS too.

Or they might have an educational component where there's online certifications and things like that that fall in. Or is that also is that a separate tool? Yeah. I don't know how I even forgot. LMS is completely honest if there's such a prevalent piece of tech. But yeah. No some some do you have I would say more. I've seen more like credit tracking versus full on LMS because you have, you know, other LMS platforms that are available depending on what you need to do.

But yes, there is an element of like continuing education unit tracking within, within a lot of the arms. See what this brings to point is that, like you said, figure out what you want. And I think what that means is just another way to interpret this is look at your membership and look at what your what your North Star is for the association.

Because there's and I like what you said earlier about putting a weight on those. What you're emphasizing when you're making that kind of rubric as far as what's important for yours. Because yeah, maybe learning management is a big deal for all associations on some level. But is it are you weigh in like, are you like chiropractors or like some like very high level, you know, stuff that needs really, really important certification around it because people's health and safety are at risk.

Then you might want to consider like that was one where you're really putting a big weight on the LMS, that you probably do have to farm out to something that's just dedicated to that. For an example that sound like a pretty good way to look at it. Yeah, I think so. And that's where it's like the events, for example, within an AMS will likely be enough for most organizations.

And even for us, when I was at mine, it was we still used it for all of our other events. It was just our one annual conference that was really big, where we were like, okay, we need a separate dedicated tool for this because we were paperless. Like we didn't have paper programs, we only had a mobile app when you were on site.

So we wanted things like that. We wanted an interactive booth map where, you know, exhibitors could click on the booth and see who's around them and stuff like that. So I think there was just more to our needs and we recognize that. So we were willing to pay for a separate piece of software for that and do the work to, you know, we still did all of our registration in our AMS, which was Novi.

So we did all of the registration through there for attendees. We just imported it into our third party event software afterward. Okay. And I'm assuming that Zapier, some of these automation tools talk to your local Claude and will tell you how to connect all those things so that you're not manually like save import, dot, dot, dot, whatever you need to do to make that all work together.

Right, exactly. And Zapier even has like, built in AI. And I think they're actually moving away from the way that they build their current workflows to Zapier AI, where you describe what you're trying to do and it will build the workflow for you. So and I think you can get a free account with Zapier and you get five free apps, and then the paid account is not it's not super expensive.

I want to say it's like it's been a while since I've had to pay for it, but. Or since I was the one, like doing the payment for it. But I want to say it was $800 for the year for like a certain amount of users. So it's not incredibly expensive, but but it could automate a lot because, I mean, it has integrations with like Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel and stuff like that.

So, you know, if you're collecting things from a Google Sheet, for example, or like a Google form and you want it to write into your AMS, you can just create a zap where when a new line is added, it can write something into your AMS if your connection exists. And I say that from experience, because nobody has Zapier like a pretty robust Zapier integration.

I think I mentioned that. So like, we'll have customers where maybe they're using a form for something in a Google form, and every time, you know, it's someone fills out this form, like, let's say it's a volunteer form, for example, or a volunteer spreadsheet, if someone adds that and they want to write what we call an activity. So basically a note saying that they were a volunteer during this time, you can create an automation where once someone fills out that form and it's added to the Google sheet, then it will automatically populate on that members timeline.

So that way that's what we call it, that activity on their timeline. So that way you can see, oh, this member has volunteered six times at these events and stuff like that. So you're getting you're building your member profile and your understanding your members. And you're collecting better data about your members and who you're engaged members are. But you're able to just create the form and have it automate the writing of those engagement activities to your AMS.

When it comes to anything, just educating yourself before you make a decision on something, especially software. Because I think the the thing too is like software can be really expensive. I see a lot of people get sticker shock when it comes to software, but I'm also as someone who's done, you know, software project management for a really long time.

That doesn't get to me because I also know you get what you pay for. So if you just go with the cheapest option, sometimes it might be reflected like it's the cheapest, the experience might reflect that it's the cheapest option and you get what you pay for. So that's why. And sometimes you might get lucky. And the cheapest option fits your needs the best.

But do your homework to figure out what is going to work for you. You talk a lot about kind of googling together a few different solutions on this. How do you categorize your needs? I mean, is it just that scorecard that you talked about? Is it doing the research and the scorecard, like sitting down? That rubric is really the most important kind of piece that you want to build out first before you start doing any sort of perplexity research, I'm assuming.

Right. Yeah, I think also just understanding what your goals are. Right. So if you have a strategic plan where, you know, actually I have an example of this, we knew that we wanted to build out just a library of resources for our members. And with the current online community solution that we were using, there were several reasons why it wasn't working for us.

So and we knew that whatever AMS we selected was going to integrate with the online community platform that we selected. So we kind of already knew that was happening, and that probably a built in online community platform in an AMS wouldn't work for what we wanted. And we when we went to go look for our online communities, the, the company that we ended up going with, one, because our goal was to create this resource library and their product had it displayed the best and seemed the easiest in terms, or seemed the closest in terms of what we were looking for for our members.

So I think it's things like that of know what's really important to your members, what the member benefits are. So like our online community was really important for us. We knew that needed to be its own tool and that it needed to be. It needed to be easy for our members to use, and also include that resource library for the events.

We knew we needed a mobile app. We knew we needed, you know, the different exhibitor registration pieces. So we knew we were going to have to go with a third party. So I think it's understanding what you need and what you want. And I would say start with your AMS, right. Because your AMS is at the heart of everything that should be, you know, that's that's your membership.

It's at the core. And that should be kind of the center of your tech stack. If your AMS can't do what you need it to do, then you explore. Because I think to like you might think you need something, and then you start working through it in your AMS and you're like, actually, no, this fits the need. We don't need to purchase this tool.

But I think when you hit a blocker and you're like, we're too big for this or it's not going to work, or that functionality doesn't exist, but it is something that's either part of your strategic plan or really important to your members that's going to help, you know, retain your members or be a big member benefit. Then it's like, okay, we need to consider maybe having a tool that's dedicated to this that does it the best, right?

Because you can have a tool that does everything, but it might not do everything the best. Yeah, yeah. And it sounds like to me, this is what I really like about our conversation is that you mentioned this a few times. Go back to the strategic plan. Start there. Look at where you're at and look at where you want to go.

Then start building out the experience in your mind in a sense. Like like we do like customer journeys, you know, like you want people through a funnel or you walk people through a process. What's that UI? What's that UX experience you want people to have, right? You want to you want to make sure that nothing gets lost or you're considering all of those options.

And sometimes that's a big challenge. But I think, you know, starting off by just brainstorming a brain, dumping all of that down and getting it, you know, in a doc somewhere. Then at that point, maybe we work our way back into AI and help AI do some of that analysis to help us understand the limitations of some of these platforms.

And then what platforms or single solution platforms like an LMS or something like that is actually going to be a better solution for you. So that makes a lot of sense as a as I'm listening to you, that seems to be where we're headed with this conversation. Is it kind of, you know, you build out with that overall organizational goal in mind.

Do you have any tips or thoughts around that change dynamic that takes place? Because I feel like people are involved in an association for, for, you know, a shared values and understanding of what they're going through. But then there comes about a time when things change or grow. How do you advise people on navigating that? Do you mean like change within your organization for like the staff on the staff side, or do you mean like the organization as a whole, like the membership shifting and stuff in your adding things to the association?

You know, like now we've got an LMS. That's a simple illustration, but you know what I mean? Like we're going to be doing this new convention or we're going to be doing this new show in spring. Now, that's a great question. And I have seen it a lot, just even outside of the association space, right where you're like, we're going to implement this tool and it's going to be great in our minds, of course.

And then you roll it out and there's crickets and adoption rates are low. And you're like, what happened? Why is nobody why is nobody using this right? Or why are we not using this in the way that we have thought? So I love this question because I think a lot of people approach project management where like when you flip the switch, it's done, right.

Yeah. And that's not the case at all. Like even in a project where, you know, you can flip the switch, there's always a monitoring phase after, right, for at least depending on what it is, 30 to 90 days to make sure, okay, things are working the way that we we said they were going to work or we wanted them to work, we can close out this project officially.

And I think there's also, you know, that retrospective of what. Well, what did it go? Well, documenting all of that. So if you ever need to do that project again, you have that documented. But I think with things like an AMS or something that's much more member facing or an LMS, for example, as part of your project plan, you need to have an adoption plan and a communications plan for how you're going to roll this out to your membership.

So when we implemented our AMS, for example, we had a lot of communication leading up to it saying like, hey, we're changing databases. You might notice some differences. We're thinking around this period. If you experience any issues, just email us, let us know. The other thing that we did was we created a lot of documentation on how to use the system that went into our communications when it got rolled out.

So at the time I used a tool called Tango and it's it's like Scribe or all these other ones that create SOP documentation for you, and it makes it super easy. There's a lot of tools. I'm not recommending Tango necessarily. There's a lot of tools out there like Tango that can do similar things, but we made sure to have documentation that was available for our members to make it easy for them to adopt it.

So it was thinking through, okay, we're going to flip the switch and we're going to turn it on, but we're not going to assume that our members are going to get things. Yeah. And I worked in tech. And it would be surprising how sometimes you're like, you didn't see this like this. But yeah. And I think the association space I mean, it's a very social community.

So communication is a huge part of it. Give me a timeline like, okay, we made a plan. We're going to switch to this new database. This example that you're talking about was this like two months before you did it? Six months, nine months, a year, like. Well, it's a timeline that's appropriate for that group to understand. Or is this like headline news?

We're switching to database and you just keep blasting that to people over the course of six months. Like what was that process like? I think what we actually did really well was that we were really good about sharing our strategic initiatives to our members. So we were sharing, you know, like as part of our plan, improving our tech stack was part of that.

We would also and I was actually going to bring this up when I was talking about, you know, figuring out what you need. We were also surveying members and figuring out what they wanted or what the pain points were for them. I think that's really important to is like sometimes we assume we know what the pain points for our members are or what the barriers are for our members to our tech.

But we really don't know until we until we survey them. I remember I was laughing, one of our board members, he said that his secretary was registering him for a conference on our old AMS, and he was like, yeah, for being a tech association. Or he said that she had said for being a tech association. Our website wasn't that great.

And I just laughed because it's like, she's not wrong. And that's part of the reason why we need to update our tech stack, because it just wasn't working for us and it wasn't working for our members either. So I think that's a big piece of it, is knowing what's going to work for your members. So it sounds like the first step is to really get to like what's going to help us internally, like with this admin team.

Maybe it's just this marketing team of one person that does this. The next level is to actually talk to the to your customers, which I would say your members are your customers. See what they need on this thing, and then look at the strategic plan and go for those reaching kind of goal oriented things. When you're establishing that rubric of what we need to fix and then put it on that kind of level, you know, those different tiers of importance, because you're right, the members, their voice is super critical around this.

But we were talking originally about the communication plan around transition and change. I mentioned timelines and a little bit about like how do we telegraph this out? Yeah. So one of the things we did really well was we kept our strategic plan front of mind for a lot of members, or tried to at least have information available on our website.

So that way people knew where we were going as an organization. The other thing that we we just plan to we had a monthly newsletter. So we would include like changes are coming in the newsletter. I would say I think we did it the two months before and then the month before to and then in the weeks leading up to when we were pushing it out to everyone, that's when we were like, hey, things are going to look different.

You're going to be able to do this, go log in, started sending documentation, and then on the actual day that we fully transitioned and wanted our members to go in like we we created like little videos of like the new websites here and stuff like that, along with the documentation of how to log in. We try to get people to go in and update their headshot as part of it of like our new websites here, go add your headshot.

Go make sure your profile information looks correct. So it was a combination of like, hey, we're announcing our new website, but also go log in. So that way, you know we get them into the system, we can get them to look at their profile information and things like that. So yeah, I would say the earlier you can communicate it to your members, the better.

You don't need to give exact dates. I think that's the thing is like people want to tell their customers or their members, like, our new website is going to be available on this day or whatever, but that doesn't give you much wiggle room if you don't make your your deadline or whatever date that you committed. So I think you can use vague language and announce it, like in your newsletters or in communications that you already have that are standardized and just say, like we have new changes coming, kind of do what we talked about tying it back to the strategic plan, tying it back to the member experience, especially if, you know, you did survey your members and they're like, it's inconvenient because I can't get into a member portal or things like that. You can use it as an opportunity. It's a PR opportunity to for you to be like, you guys spoke and we listened, and we're doing our best right now to provide a better experience for you. That idea of kind of doing it in multiple channels too.

So you've got the newsletter, which some people read, then you've got videos which some people will look at. You know, you kind of have to hit them in a in a variety of different ways. And I always a big proponent of video and I think that, you know, especially when you've got process that is here's how you update your profile pic.

Like that's a really great way of getting people to be because you're speaking to their egos a little bit, you know, like, hey, oh yeah, that thing is that was from 1987. Like, I need to update that photo. So you kind of tie in that to their ego a little bit and get them involved and engaged in the new website.

I always fall for that one. But what's really nice is you, if you have a video that just is 2 or 3 minutes just to record screen recording, here's how you go in and change your profile pic. You know, that's it usually gets a pretty good engagement. And then there's limits. A lot of questions back to you. Now, is there a process to where you almost have people on like customer support watch like, okay, you have this shift, I have the next shift in like, yeah, for the emails and help people out as much as we can.

Exactly. And we always tell our customers to do what's called a soft launch, right? Where you actually launch your website, you move it over to your domain. It's live. People can get to it or but you haven't necessarily told the membership. The new website is here because what happens is if you if you send everyone to your website at once and something is wrong, you're going to get 50 emails of, I can't log in or this isn't working and blah blah, and it's going to feel really overwhelming.

You know, you're gonna you're going to be like, this is a mess. This was not a success, right? Like, it's not going to feel like it was a successful implementation in some way. But at the same time, it's like if you give let's say we say like 1 to 2 weeks, right? Let people come to your website organically.

Members who are going to go there anyway for whatever they were looking for. If they try to log in and there's an issue, you can help them. And then if you start to recognize a pattern, then then you can say, oh, there's something wrong, like, let's make sure we address this before we roll it out to the entire membership.

So we always tell everyone, you know, do I don't love the term soft launch because I think it can be confusing to people. They're like, no, no, no, it's not actually live on our domain yet. And like, no, that is live. It's just you have an announcement to your members yet. So I would say launch, but don't announce it for 1 to 2 weeks until afterward.

Because and that's what we tell all of our customers, because you're not putting yourself, you're not putting a hard deadline on yourself. So you help mitigate not meeting your deadline. And you're also just able to deal if there are issues, you're able to deal with them on a smaller scale and make sure you address them before you roll it out to the mass.

That's a really good strategy, and it does take the pressure off of everybody, because doing those types of integrations like you're talking about can be very complicated. Then you can get some organic feedback from people to like, hey, this is work or this does work great. Or maybe you want to change something there, gives you a little bit of that wiggle.

I like that a lot. All right. So one of the things that I really was refreshed by, and this is something that there's a lot of fear around AI, let's just say that's out there that it's going to steal jobs and all that stuff. And I liked your perspective on this. Why don't you talk a little bit about it?

And I think the quote you, you told me, which I really liked, was AI is not a job stealer. It's a task stealer. Once you elaborate on that a little bit. Yeah, sure. And I do want to preface this with educate yourself and use AI responsibly, because I know I think there are a lot of people who are fearful of AI in some ways, because there are a lot of horror stories out there, you know, people using coworkers and deleting everything, or, you know, AI having hallucinating and all of this stuff.

I think if you're very careful with what you're using AI for, there's not as much risk involved. So I want to say I am a big proponent of AI in a safe way. I know there have been things around like people putting a lot of financial data and stuff like that. I'm like, no, no, no, no, don't do that.

Don't put like confidential personal information in there. I mean, and there are ways that you can use that, like anonymize it, but it's just be educated and be very mindful with what you're doing with AI. But I think there's a lot that you can do with AI that's pretty safe. And yeah, so I'm a firm believer. I don't think AI is taking jobs

I think it's taking tasks now. There are a lot of task based jobs where, you know, it's probably taking the majority of that. But I think if you can use AI creatively, you can identify other ways that you can show your value. Right. So and one of the things I just think of things, tasks that would take me hours, like creating a rubric, for example, used to take me a really long time.

We would do a meeting with all of the stakeholders involved, do drafting of the requirements, stuff like that. Now with AI, if I have some sort of meeting reporter like Granola, Fathom, all of those have it. Just get the entire transcript in the meeting, and then I go and put it into Claude or whatever and say, create this rubric for me, right?

And if you're very clear, like through your meeting of okay, this is the needs to have section, now we're going to talk about the needs to have. And then it's recorded like that in your meeting. It's going to be outlined like that okay. Now we're moving on to the nice to have section. It's recorded like that okay. Now these are the this may not exist, but let's talk about like if in our dream world what the system could do.

If you if you're clear and you have an agenda in whatever you're discussing in your meeting, you have it outlined already. You can even talk about weights and stuff like that in it and it would like. Then you just take the transcript, plug it into Claude, say, I'm making this rubric, especially if you have a sample one already, it can start drafting those requirements for you.

So I think it's things like that, things that there are so many tasks like putting presentations together. I had to do I think it was like a Q2 update of the onboarding department. And, you know, in the past, something like that would have taken me a few hours to get together, not just to I had to aggregate and then put it into a slide deck and stuff like that.

Claude gave me this amazing cruise themed cruise ship themed presentation. If anyone who knows me knows I love puns more than anything, and I also love a good theme. So you know. And I love making presentations fun and engaging. So I was like, you know what? We're going to go with the cruise ship theme because we're onboarding and we're all going to get on board and you know it.

I was like, wow, Claude knows more puns than me. I think I've been out to out pun. So no, I made it better than I could have ever made it in some ways. And I think where some of the issues and, you know, ways that we're talking about people are not using safely using AI is like they're not checking the work, they're kind of just relying on it.

And that's where it's like, I use AI to start a lot of things for me, but I don't want to lose my critical thinking abilities. I don't want to lose my ability to read and write. So it's really just used as a partner for me and like a colleague. And then I still spend some time cleaning drafts up, you know, doing the critical thinking pieces because it's not going to get it right.

It's not going to get it perfect. And we need to make sure that we're watching that. But yeah, I mean, I think there's just so many things that it can help with, especially like data analysis, more of like the qualitative to not necessarily the quantitative. It can help with identifying trends and stuff like that. If you have, you know, data that's not numbers.

So I think there's just so many things that it can do to make work faster. Yeah. And I think that that's the thing is like that analysis side of things, that's how we really lean into it, is that side of it as far as the content creation side of it. That's where I think we have a lot. The jury's out whether there's an oral on it, because there's so much time going back to it and like rewriting and re-editing and changing.

And I'll try it this way with this voice and, you know, it's like if I just sat down and just started typing, sometimes I feel like that was a lot faster because it's a more pure. And so that content creation side of things, we don't do any design work that comes out of AI or anything like that. It's not there, even close with any of that stuff yet there.

But that analysis side of things is a really important thing. So we've talked a lot about AI and how it really helps with analysis. That's great. But you also when we talk about prompting AI, you've previously mentioned a really cool framework. And if you could I'm not sure it's called RADIO. Speak a little bit about that. Yeah.

So RADIO, it's actually stands for role, audience, detail or description, output and examples. So role is what you want the role of your AI tool to be right. So if you want it to act as a consultant for example, or an expert slide designer, what role do you want AI to take on when it's completing this task or providing this output?

Audience is who's the audience for whatever the output is, detail and description is just as much detail as you can provide. The more context you can provide, the better you're going to get a better output right away. The more detail and more description that you have, because it's just going to have clear direction versus just trying to guess and like pulling whatever.

So I would say the detail and the description are really important and then is output. So what you what you want out of the tool. Like do you need a slide deck. Do you need, you know a document whatever. And then examples like if you have specific examples like I use the case of the rubric. Right. So if I had an old sample rubric I would use that as an example of like this is a rubric that I had for a different implementation.

Use this as the framework for the rubric that I want as output. So if you have those those key elements, it really helps with getting a better output on the first try. Because I think right now a lot of people are using AI, almost like to ask questions or as I go. So if you have a little bit more structure to it, you'll get better outputs.

And I have to give a shout out to Caltech, because I learned this style of prompting from them from a PMI OC event. But Caltech does do a free AI tools for everyone. It's a six week course, so highly recommend if you're interested in that, and you want to learn more about the tools that are available to you or the AI tools that are available.

They do a really good course and it's free. So you can sign up in the description show description too, so people can go and learn. I think this is a the more we can learn about this, the better off. And I'm sure they're quite a great resource. Caltech. Great. Yeah, I think they have a bunch of other free courses too.

So outside of AI, if there's other tech related things, I think they have some other ones, so it's definitely worth exploring. Nice. But one of the things I do want to mention is there are different. There's there's a bunch of different models and each model is optimized for different tasks. So Claude, for example, they have documentation that tells you which model is best for which tasks.

So I think if you can, whatever tool you're using, if you can understand which models are best for which a you'll preserve credits, because I know that's been a lot of talk of there's, you know, all of the credits getting eaten up. I think that's a big like mistake that a lot of first timers use. They use like the, the model that uses the most credits for the most basic things, and you eat through your credits really quickly.

And then also to depending on what you're using, like in Claude, for example, Cowork is meant to do things that are a little bit more powerful, so often start with a chat to figure out exactly what I need and what I want to get Cowork to do. So that way I save credits by starting in a chat, and then eventually I mean Claude will also help push you eventually like into Cowork.

So like depending on what you're trying to build, start with a chat. And then if you need to take it to the next step, then you can use Cowork. That's a good good. Yeah. So I would say just educate yourself around the models if you're finding some people might not need it. Right. If you're like, I'm not running into issues with my credits, okay then cool.

Then although I would still say educate yourself around it because you might be using the wrong model. Like you might get better outputs if you use a different model than what you're using. Yeah, but it's definitely important. And I will say to you with the AI tools for everyone course that's great. It is a six week course. I believe there's like some Zoom sessions, but if there's also something you want to learn on your own, use the AI to train you on AI.

I had Claude build me my own course and I told it like my optimal or my learning style was not reading. I wanted to either hear it or see it because I'm much more. I'm much more of a visual learner. I mean, don't get me wrong, I know how to read it read pretty well, but I definitely do much better when I can see it.

So I had it build me a course that aggregated YouTube videos each week, and I did it weekly on purpose because I didn't want to do the six weeks of curriculum ahead of time, because I was changing so fast that there might be something new out the week that I get to it. Also, if I don't follow it in the six weeks, I don't feel as bad.

So like I can just do it at my own pace. So. So I had Claude build me a like AI mastery course that aggregated YouTube videos and also gave me exercises to that were related to the video. So that way I could actually implement what I'm doing and I took it and like I'm using it at work. So I think there's just so much power in AI in ways that I think we're not seeing it that like it can.

The world is at our fingertips. And I know that sounds much to say, but it's so exciting to me because I feel like I can do so many things that I was like, I didn't think five years ago I would ever be able to do some of this. The way I kind of think about it, too, is be sensitive to where friction occurs, and it can be just little, tiny, little widgets in your mind that are all of a sudden like, I don't want to do that.

Like whenever you hear that in your head, like, okay, start typing, or I even use Whisper Flow, which again, we're mentioning a lot of products on this show and we're not advocates or promoting them. We're not getting paid for any of this. But I use Whisper for just hit a key on my keyboard, close my eyes and just start chatting to my computer.

I'm like, can you fix this? And then I look up and push the red button and then bingo, life is 50% better. You bring up such a good point, Eric, because usually what I'll figure out are the parts of my job that are tedious that I don't love to do. And I'm like, how can I use AI? Or how can I automate this and make it better?

Because it's, I reckon, like I'm pretty good at recognizing when something's a time step. I'm like, this is not the best use of my time at all. How can I make this better? So I think that's a that's a good if you're not using AI now and you want to use AI more, that's a good like I guess prompt essentially of like I'm doing something I hate doing that's really like monotonous and tedious and the same thing over and over.

How can I use AI to make this better? And I understand to like some of this also comes with like policies in your organization. Some organizations don't allow you to use AI. So definitely like, you know, again, proceed with caution. Make sure you're doing things safely. Make sure you're compliant with whatever your policies at your organization are. But I think that's where I'm like, what tasks do I hate and how can I automate them both in my personal life too?

Like I use it for like meal planning and stuff? Because meal planning more than anything, and you can get so specific, like if you're trying to lose weight. I was like, I want a 1700 calorie volume eating plan because your girl loves to eat but also wants to lose weight like it can help in so many ways. So like even if you are, if you're at a place where you can't use it at work, maybe explore with it in your personal life with things that are really low stakes, that aren't going to be your where you're not, like giving away sensitive information.

And one of the tips I think it's I've heard this a million times and I've done it myself is keep a record and keep teaching it about you. Like keep it all under one account if you possibly can, and then go in and create like those files inside of Cowork or inside of chat that tell you tell who you are.

You know, I give it my LinkedIn. Here's my background, here's what I do. I give it all the transcripts out of the podcast that we're doing. It learns my language. It learns how to speak like me. So it's learned over the last year and a half that I've been using it extensively. I think that it's now a really powerful tool to speak for me in some ways, or think for me because it knows my challenges, my limitations, and it understands my voice and can help me in that one too.

So yeah, definitely, I try to use projects for specific things because it learns from the context and you have those documents and from what? From what I've found, the better and the clearer the context per project, the better the output and the more it's going to be on track with what you want. So I do recommend to your point, yes, leaving it all under the same account, but separating your projects depending on what you're working on.

So like let's say you're working on a project to develop your content calendar that could be its own, its own project with specific content and history. I actually use Claude to also after a while it will have because in Claude specifically, and I'm sure it's the same tools tool, you can write instructions for that project after I have a bunch of chats, like I'll start with my own instructions for that project where it's like, do this, don't do that, whatever.

After, you know, ten or so chats, sometimes even less. Just if depending on how long the chats were all have Claude go back and write project instructions for that project based on the history of the outputs. Yeah, because I mean, I check it, but yeah, understand yourself and you know, it can kind of reflect back a little bit more accurate reality for what it needs to do that.

Exactly. It's learning by just the chat history and can give you the best. It could probably give you better project instructions than you you'd be able to come up with on your own. Well, I like what you said to about using other tools even I've, you know, used Claude to give me prompts for chat and vice versa and Perplexity for, you know, like I bounce around between all the tools as well to help me optimize whatever my goals are.

You know, inside, maybe I use Claude pretty much for most things, but I'll use other tools to help me prompt Claude as well. And I think that that's a pretty great tool. Let's close this out. I've got one last question for you to to thank you so much for all of your wonderful feedback, information, resources, tips, tricks. You've really been on the front line of a lot of, you know, working with a lot of different organizations and helping them to understand maybe what's the most important thing for them and what they need for their group.

But if someone walks away from this episode and does one thing differently tomorrow. What do you think that one thing should be? I think that I would hope that they would just stop for a second and kind of evaluate what's going on right now in their workflows, and take the time to put in the work to either if you recognize it's your AMS not working for you, for example, doing the work to make sure you find the tool that fits for you.

I've been on the end of inheriting a piece of tech that was just thrown onto me that I didn't select, and I'll tell you what, it was a mess. So I will say, it may seem like it's a lot of work, but it's a change in the mindset of if you put the work in now, the it's going to pay off in the long run.

And so I think it's just whether it be, you know, adopting AI, whatever you decide, I think put in the work at the beginning and have a strong foundation and it's going to pay off in the end and things are just going to run better and smoother for you. I think if you if you put the time in the beginning, I will say like that's the hardest part, as that has been as a project manager is getting people to understand like stop for a second, don't just do.

And it's really hard because things move so quickly. Like you just want to dive in, you want to start doing it, you want to, you know, I'm all for bias to action. But I think at the same time, if you can stop and be very intentional and methodical with what you're doing, it's going to make things a lot easier, especially because something like this is change.

And I always tell my my onboarding specialists that project management is change management and change is not easy. I am one of those weirdos who loves change. Like I'm like, yeah, things are constantly evolving. Let's change with it. But I know that is not the case for everyone. So with big changes like this, you need to have the buy in.

You need to do the work. You need to find what fits for you. So I would just say in anything you do, even outside of tech, just with work, just be really intentional and methodical with what you're doing. I love that, and I think your tips on incorporating AI into that a little bit to help you think through that and stop and then start just working with one of your AI tools to help you as a partner.

Think through some of the stuff and see where that leads a little bit to, especially when it comes to stopping, analyzing, thinking through some of these things and making some pretty important decisions around big, important changes that not everybody loves and embraces. I got to be honest, some people don't love change. Yeah, I would say in my experience, most people don't like change.

But I'm like, we're going to change it. They're like most up stuff and I'm like, it's going to be great, I promise, I promise. Yeah, well, thank you so much. This has been a really insightful conversation, and I really appreciate you spending the time to open up your brain and let us peek around inside and kind of learn a lot about the space that you've spent many, many years helping other organizations shepherd that change into their group.

It's been very important to hear some of these insights from you, somebody who's working on the front lines of this every single day. Let us know a little bit how we can get in touch with you, where people can talk to you or email you or reach out. I am on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to, you know, I nerd out on this stuff like I turned out on project management.

I nerd out on how people are using AI. Like if someone's using it in a really cool way, I would love to hear about it. Like, I, I just love, you know, talking about all this stuff. So if you're interested or, you know, if you're if I can understand, it's really intimidating too. So if anyone's intimidated by it and they're like, I don't know where to start.

Like, please reach out. I'm happy to help however I can. We'll put your LinkedIn in the show description as well, along with the Caltech learning class that you had talked about as well. We're on AI, but thank you again to that. It's been really great having you on the show. Thanks so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

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