By Dale Paulson, Ph.D., President of Allegiance Research Group

Let’s face it, there is some pretty lousy assn marketing out there. You can always blame poor economic times and if the boss is happy and the board is not complaining, why change? Occasionally a committee chairperson gets ambitious and asks “Why can’t we grow?” This is when your wit should hit the sham. In other words, use your wit to defend the status quo. Here’s how.

Outsource is what you should be doing. Yep, there are some good outfits that will do mass marketing for you. Take a company like Churn’em and Burn’em Inc. They will mail thousands of letters about your assn and a 2% response is considered wildly successful. Never mind that you can do the same thing yourself, and that 98% of the prospects say “No” to you because the mass mailing did not say the right thing to them. As a bonus, when things don’t work out you can blame your outsource buddy.

Assume that all of your members are basically the same. After all, they all paid dues didn’t they? But what if your members are different and have different needs? You must figure out what they want. You’ve got enough to do without opening that “can of worms.”

Forget preferred channels of communications. People like to get their info in different ways. What a hassle. I mean there are some great e-mail churners who will do all your communications. If people don’t want info the way you want to send it, ignore them.

Take your time responding. Some people are excited when they first see what you offer, but there are only 8 hours in the day and they can wait.

Make your assn like junior high. We all fondly remember jr high when it was important to belong to the right “clique.” Let some of your more aggressive members run things. They will like you better and it means less work for you.

There you have it, 5 ways to keep your job simple and 5 more in the next article. Remember, “Change is Pain!” But should you be an assn exec who wants to make a difference, I invite you to visit www.YTheyJoin.com