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Education: Associations Gotta Have
It
By Bob Andelman
(Written in Nov. 1992 for Association Meetings
magazine)
Continuing education requirements are growing and opportunities
are blossoming for association members at a time when travel
budgets are shrinking. There are fewer dollars available than
ever before for week-long seminars at fancy resorts, but strangely
enough, plenty of money is still in place to pay for quality
education programs.
That's the quandary many professional associations are finding
themselves in: Members demanding more knowledge, but unable to
pay the price to get to it. And it isn't just the expense of
airfare and hotel; competitive worries during the recession make
it hard to justify time away from the office.
Sue Christiansen is the management conferences coordinator
for the Alliance of American Insurers. She sees fewer national
and more regional meetings in her future.
"It would change the whole structure of our conferences,"
she says. "But we're having to deal with the economy and
find ways of keeping attendance up. We're hearing people say,
'I can't attend this year because my company has cut back.' I
think we could get attendance up if we had shorter meetings and
people didn't have to be away from the office as much."
It's a time for innovation. It has to be: an American Society
of Association Executives survey of 550 national associations
showed they spent $8.5-billion on education and training in 1989
alone. That's why a wide array of trade and professional association
education directors and meeting planners are feverishly developing
new strategies - and altering existing ones - to satisfy their
members.
Here's how:
On The Road
Decentralized programs are becoming the answer for more and
more associations. They're trading large-scale programs in large
major metro areas such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles for
multiple meetings in secondary markets within a day's drive for
enough members to make it worthwhile.
Lorraine Bergstrom, director of meetings and conferences for
the American Compensation Association (ACA), says that she expects
to drastically reduce travel expenses for her members in 1993
by changing the way her association schedules its 300
annual education seminars.
"In the past, we have offered four to six seminars concurrently
in major cities," she says. "We'll still do that, but
we're also offering seminars in third and fourth tier cities.
We did six of these regional meetings in 1992 and they were well-attended.
It's the way to go."
ACA might go to Chicago five times in a year with its seminars.
In years past, if its members needed to take a certification
program on human resources and benefits, they'd have to find
their way from Denver or Columbus to the Windy City. There were
no other options. Now they might want to go to a city more conveniently
located.
"We never held anything in Charlotte before; members
there had to drive to Atlanta," Bergstrom says. "But
we're now going to Charlotte with a course. And we might go back
two or three times a year with different courses."
Other new cities set to host ACA education meetings in 1993
include Cincinnati, Raleigh, Louisville, Milwaukee, Memphis and
Indianapolis. "The effort is to take the meetings to the
people so they can attend," Bergstrom says. "It's the
most drastic method we've taken yet to cut costs."
Bergstrom, who says that her multi-million-dollar education
budget has so far been insulated from budget cuts, adds that
while expanding her association's regional offerings, one element
has been phased out: cocktail parties/networking events.
"It's a cost savings, a liability problem and, ultimately,
people didn't want to attend," she says. "The regional
seminars are nuts and bolts; people are there for education.
Networking parties were not meeting their needs."
The downside of regional meetings is that they put more demands
on education staff and meeting planners. Bergstrom says that
when she schedules education meetings in Charlotte or Dallas,
she won't send a professional planner to oversee the event.
"I have contract coordinators," she says. "My
staff could never travel to every one of these things, so I now
have an east coast coordinator who does all my east coast meetings.
She does nothing but cover meetings for us. It's usually a drive
in the car or commuter transportation for her." The contract
coordinators come to Bergstrom through word-of-mouth referrals
and are not usually association members. Similarly, Bergstrom
uses 200 contract field instructors who have a variety of expertises
and can be hired on a job-only basis.
A potential negative on the expense side: one-day or two-day
meetings don't usually give associations a great deal of leverage
in negotiating rates with hotels.
"We're going into (local) hotels where we know we're
going to get hurt with meeting room rentals," Bergstrom
says. "We're hoping members choose to stay at the hotel
because they don't have other travel expenses. If we pick up
75 percent of our room block, there is no meeting room rental
charge. If we fall below that, we pay rental on a sliding scale.
But it might be better for the organization to absorb that meeting
room rental because at least we're getting attendance."
Planners hope that if they go into a city which has a hotel
chain with which they do a lot of business nationally, favorable
terms will still be possible. The chain would have to balance
the potential for more meetings and a client's brand loyalty
versus fewer room nights.
The National Office Products Association (NOPA) is another
group that is shifting gears to meet recessionary pressures.
"Our members are looking harder and harder at discretionary
dollars," communications director Simon De Groot says. "The
challenge to us is that they still want access to education,
but the expense and time away from the business are looming larger
in their eyes. We had to respond accordingly, so we've moved
to what you'd call a short, local and cheap scenario."
In previous years, NOPA ran three-day seminars in semi-resort
settings, combining education and recreation. No more. Education
meetings are being spread out to small markets and airport hotels,
sometimes taking up as little as a half-day or an evening's time.
And NOPA relies on a network of regional reps to do its booking
instead of dispatching planners from headquarters.
"Our members want business," De Groot says. "They
want a source of ideas and techniques that will help them run
their businesses better. That is the primary motivation for them."
Increasing worldwide certification requirements are pushing
demands for education within the American Welding Society. AWS
will offer roughly 150 courses in 1993 at 104 U.S. locations.
That's up from just six locations a dozen years ago.
"We're really hitting a big schedule this year,"
education director Don Grubbs says. "In the early years
of the program, we'd see 200 to 300 people. Last year, we educated
and certified over 5,000."
AWS has 41,000 members, but an estimated 60 percent of the
men and women going through its education programs are non-members.
To convert them, the association automatically bestows one-year
complimentary AWS membership upon all graduates of its certification
programs. Grubbs says that 80 percent of those graduates go on
to become permanent members.
While AWS has scheduled 104 training sessions for 1993, Grubbs
says that number could easily top 200 by year's end. That's because
of the flexibility the Society is offering; employers are being
encouraged to hire the AWS to do cost-effective, on-site training
in lieu of sending employees to out-of-town workshops. It's a
three-year-old service that is taking off. AWS delivered eight
domestic and six international special programs in fiscal
year 1991-'92; it has already presented 14 domestic and 11 overseas
programs in the first half of the '92-'93 fiscal year.
"The advantage," says Grubbs, " is that you
have your people in class at your facility. If you need them,
you can jerk them out of class. And you don't have to pay travel
and per diems. We kind of have a chokehold on the welding community
because we're the only ones offering this."
Of course, the increased demand is likely to play havoc with
Grubbs and his staff.
"I've got bait and water to catch a 100-pound fish,"
Grubbs says, "and I've got water to catch a 200-pound fish.
I hope my line holds."
More Mailings, More Locations and Shorter
Sessions
Austerity is the word at the National Association of Rehabilitation
Facilities, where new director of education and training Dr.
Dave Carlson is shortening and regionalizing his seminar programs
for 1993.
Carlson is targeting one-day events to reduce registration
and travel expenses. To make the new format work, he's focusing
his energies on better marketing practices. That means up to
four times as many direct-mail notices to regional members for
each meeting. And late registration will no longer be frowned
upon.
"You have to make it easy for people to attend,"
he says.
The National Bar Association looked at its marketing of educational
programs and found it wasn't using its own resources to best
advantage. Now instead of a single mailing, members receive as
many as three solicitations to meetings. And it no long shies
away from promotion within its own publications, according to
Maurice Foster, director of special projects.
Piggybacking and Dovetailing
Education directors at organizations as diverse as the American
Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums (AAZPA) and the
American Psychological Association (APA) are working on ways
to attach a day of national education topics to regional and
state meetings. If a three-day regional conference has already
been scheduled, for instance, isn't a fourth day more convenient
than a second trip two months later?
In the case of Parks and Aquariums, its members require increasing
training in species survival plans, so director of education
Nancy Hotchkiss is studying ways to dovetail species survival
meetings with conferences that are already set up.
"Our plans are evolving," Hotchkiss says with a
laugh. "We're into evolution."
AAZPA is actually considering a consolidation of its five
regional conferences to just three - but that could be a budgetary
improvement for cash-strapped members. As it stands, many members
have to attend a regional conference plus another meeting in
their specific discipline in order to get the training they need.
AAZPA wants to add horticultural and species survival plan courses
to what would be three super-regional conferences. Members might
stay over an extra day at the super-regionals, but they'd have
one less trip to make.
The American Psychological Association has a two-tiered approach
to increasing its members' access to education programs. While
the association has increased continuing education workshops
at its annual conference from 25 to 60 in the last few years,
Barbara Hammonds says she is looking at ways of taking education
to the psychologists instead of simply expecting them to come
to the yearly conference.
In 1992 for the first time, APA co-sponsored a regional conference
with the Eastern Psychological Association. Eastern already had
a Friday-through-Sunday meeting scheduled; with the cooperation
of the APA, Eastern added a fourth day of education meetings
on Thursday.
"They had never done a continuing education program,"
Hammonds, director of APA's continuing education programs, says.
"They contacted us and said, 'Our members are asking for
C.E. activities in conjunction with our meeting." The cooperative
effort was so successful that APA and Eastern will team up twice
in '93 and APA has scheduled similar sessions with other regional
and related associations such as the National Association of
School Psychologists and the American Counseling Association.
"We're trying to take the workshops regional without seeming
to come on too heavy and muscle in on the state and regional
associations," Hammonds says.
TV Talk
Video conferencing is still a relatively new phenomenon for
association meetings. It works for some situations better than
others. When the American Institute of Architects (AIA) needed
to rapidly transmit to its members the details of the new federal
Americans with Disabilities Act, the idea of organizing a single
national or multiple regional meetings seemed daunting and unwieldy.
Instead, AIA gave video a whirl.
"Our members needed information. It was critical,"
group vice president of practice education Richard W. Hobbs says.
"The law was going into effect and they needed to know how
they would be affected."
AIA teamed up with Public Broadcasting System (PBS) to gain
access to PBS' 200 existing downlink sites nationwide at TV stations,
hospitals and colleges. The program was transmitted live via
satellite from Washington in three, three-hour chunks over three
months. After each broadcast was an hour of local participation
led by an on-scene expert in the new legislation.
Although Hobbs terms the AIA's short turnaround time an organizational
"nightmare," the technological elements of the video
conference worked quite smoothly. The cost was $195 per person,
a bargain when factored against travel costs for an out-of-town
meeting and days away from the office. Attendance - enhanced
by non-AIA members at PBS sites - was a remarkable 20,000 people
at one or more of the three sessions. A follow-up seminar on
the environment is scheduled for '93, although AIA will organize
its own downlink network this time.
"The plan is that the Institute will use the technology
in the future," Hobbs says. "We have an obligation
to get information to our members. If this proves to be the best
way, this is the way to go."
Television education may not be for everyone though, Hobbs
warns.
"Are your members likely to watch TV?" he suggests
other planners consider. "One of the concerns we had was
that our professionals would not watch TV. Some feel it is inefficient;
others feel they need more hands-on. That's why we added the
hour at the end."
American Bar Association members in 70 cities have had access
to satellite conferences for a decade. Now the ABA is adapting
video for additional uses.
"We have felt the effect of the recession," division
for professional education director Dick Carter says. "People
are concerned about how many people they send to our meetings
and how expensive it is. A lot of law firms are doing continuing
education in-house and we're helping."
In addition to taping its satellite conferences for later
use, the ABA's education division produces continuing education
programming specifically for use by small groups or individuals.
Carter says that video courses on certain topics provide education
at a considerably reduced cost to traveling to a remote locate
for a three-day seminar. "Firms tell us they don't want
their lawyers to spend time away from billable hours," he
says.
The Implementation Generation
Encourage non-members to attend pgms One of the ways the Grocery
Manufacturers of America (GMA) found to increase interest in
its new Center for Education program was to call on its
own members to present case studies in areas as varied as coupons
and reclamation centers.
"We've brought companies forward to talk about how they're
doing things," John Gray, vice president of education and
industrial affairs counsel, says. "That formula has really
brought people out. We call it the 'implementation through case
study' approach. It's good advertising for the companies and
a chance for the industry to hear about it first-hand. One company
will make a pitch for what it is doing and the others cherry-pick
what they can use."
GMA's membership includes companies such as Phillip Morris,
Kraft, Kellogg, Quaker Oats and Pepsi in food and non-food manufacturing.
"There's an old adage about, 'Those who can't, teach,'"
Gray says. "We're calling on those who can, to teach."
Another new development for GMA is keeping its meetings to
one day or a day and a half, tops. "We pack a fair amount
in," Gray says. And his members like it: Gray says that
for a meeting at which he optimistically budgeted for 85 attendees,
140 showed up. "I think we hit a nerve," he says.
Other Ideas
There are a few more notions in the wind to make meetings
more user-friendly. Several associations - American Institute
of Architects and the American Nurses Association are two - are
developing online computer services that can be used for continuing
education. This comes on the heels of surveys indicating a large
percentage of members with access to computers and modems.
And the "workshop-in-a-box" concept is a popular
one. In this scenario, a national association supplies facilitators
guides, workbooks and even interactive videos to regional, state
or local affiliates.
end
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express written permission of the author.
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