Fifteen Ways to Learn from Your Members
A Guide for Associations and Nonprofits
Summary
“Get closer than ever to your customer. So close, in fact, that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.”
Steve Jobs
Even though I lead an organization called the product community, our sole focus is on understanding, creating, and sustaining relationships with our members, communities, or stakeholders. In this article, I use the word customer as an umbrella proxy for all the audiences we serve (including prospective members).
All associations want the answers to these questions:
Who are they?
What do they care about?
What problems are they struggling with?
How do they spend their time?
What do they want?
What do they need?
Customer is one of six association product competencies. The others are culture, vision, design + build, go to market, and performance. Great products are highly in-tune with the rhythms of customer needs and wants and attuned to a rapidly changing external environment.
The Product Community is a product development learning community designed specifically for associations.
Continuous Discovery
“One thing I really love about continuous discovery is that you don’t need a lot of time to get started. The key is to work at one habit at a time, rather than trying to adopt the whole framework at once.”
Teresa Torres
The authentic way for an association to thrive is to understand, empathize with, and get to know our customers. Understanding their needs and pain points is important for several reasons:
Value Creation. It helps us create tailored solutions, products, or value that directly addresses their challenges, leading to increased member satisfaction and retention.
Connection. It allows for better communication and connection, ensuring that our messaging and programming resonates with our audience (and ultimately creates and deepens engagement).
Community. It helps us understand and leverage patterns about our membership, ensuring we can create the right community experiences to meet their needs.
Data. It allows us to collect and analyze qualitative and quantitative data about who our customers are and what makes them tick, creating both efficiencies and new opportunities.
Innovation. Understanding member needs can help foster innovation, enabling us to stay relevant, competitive, and ahead of the curve.
Knowing our customers helps to create a clear, shared, and ongoing understanding of who we serve and why. In fact, the best way to understand our people, community, or market (past, current, prospective) is to invest in continuous discovery.
According to Teresa Torres, “good product discovery includes the customer throughout the [product development] decision-making process.” Here are several tactics and frameworks – organized into four buckets – associated with continuous discovery:
Relationship-Building. Largely qualitative, these techniques have a dual nature: we build and deepen relationships with our members as people while gaining new insight into their professional struggles.
Customer Interviews. Direct, open, and ongoing conversations with members to understand their motivations, challenges, and preferences. This method provides valuable insights into their experiences and needs.
Ethnographic Studies. Immersing ourselves in the member's environment and observing their behaviors, needs, and interactions in their natural setting.
Customer Visits. Actively visiting and engaging with members in their context to gain firsthand insights into their needs and challenges.
Behavior Analysis. These techniques are largely quantitative (though sometimes can incorporate qualitative data through focus groups) and based on collecting and analyzing insights from clicks, likes, comments, and other online actions.
Usability Tests. Assessing how easily members can use your association's services or platforms. This helps identify usability issues, areas for improvement, and our ability to deliver seamless customer experiences.
A/B Tests. Comparing two versions (A and B) of a service or feature to understand which performs better with members. This method helps us understand what members prefer and aids us in making data-driven decisions.
Demand Tests. Testing the demand for a new program before fully implementing it. It helps validate concepts and avoid investing resources in ideas that might not resonate with members.
Assumption Tests. Identifying and testing assumptions about member behavior or needs to validate or refute those assumptions through data or feedback.
Mapping. These are several ways of tracking member actions, preferences, and problems. Each warrants deeper exploration, but for the purposes of this article here is a brief overview:
Customer Journey Mapping. Visualizing the member's journey, from initial contact to ongoing engagement. This helps identify pain points and areas for improvement in the member experience.
Experience Mapping. Similar to customer journey mapping but focuses on the emotional and cognitive aspects of the member's experience. It delves deeper into feelings and perceptions at various touch points.
Story Mapping. Organizing member needs or features into a narrative flow to understand their priorities and how they interconnect.
Assumption Mapping. Mapping out all assumptions about members or their needs and systematically validating or invalidating them.
Strategy. Though there is overlap with other techniques listed above, these four can be aligned with an association’s strategic priorities. They may take more investment and patience for results or outcomes to emerge.
Objectives and Key Results. Setting measurable objectives aligned with member needs and tracking key results to assess the association's progress.
Opportunity Solution Trees. A structured approach to explore potential solutions for member problems and identify the best options based on feasibility and impact.
Impact Mapping. Visualizing how association activities or programs will impact members, helping prioritize efforts based on potential outcomes.
Jobs-to-be-Done. Understanding the underlying reasons why members "hire" the association's services or solutions to accomplish specific tasks or goals.
As I suggest above, these techniques (or tactics) together can seem like an overwhelming commitment of time and resources. Therefore, try to start small by coming up with a plan to dig deep into one or two tactics and scaffold (over time) to learn more about your membership. Over time, combining several of these methods can provide a comprehensive view of member needs.
From this, we can develop and deliver the value that members desire while simultaneously building a culture of sustained connection.
Build Value Around Customer Needs
“We've had three big ideas at Amazon that we've stuck with for 18 years, and they're the reason we're successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.”
Jeff Bezos
Good associations have thriving communities. They are connected and in tune with the wants and needs of our members. We see them as flesh and blood people. Understanding our customers (or members or stakeholders) helps us understand our market. In the product community, we start with two ways of thinking about this.
One is getting better at empathizing and walking the walk of the ideal customer; the other is building really cool, compelling products and experiences that attract these members and keep them coming back for more.
In turn, ideally, these members tell all their friends.
This graphic is a high-level view on the traditional view of our membership (on the left) and its wants and needs. It’s largely built on a staff-centric, departmental view in which events, publications, and learning each have different channels. The model is built largely on assumptions.
The new model of engagement (above on the right) puts the customer at the center of everything, including all experiences, service, and the entire product portfolio. The customer desires longitudinal learning journeys and perennial connection and this is how we can deliver it.
Associations aren’t just a collection of volunteer committees designed to channel the wants of the membership.
We can be engines of innovation focused exclusively on the customer experience. This takes deep investment in product development that stems from continuous discovery, sustained relationship-building, and deep empathy for understanding and solving a customer’s pain points.
In doing so, our associations will become indispensable and from this indispensability comes evergreen relevance and sustained growth. Remember, product-led growth fuels connection. Join the product community and flip your destiny.
About the Author
James Young is founder and chief learning officer of the product community®. Jim is an engaging trainer and leading thinker in the worlds of associations, learning communities, and product development. Prior to starting the product community®, Jim served as Chief Learning Officer at both the American College of Chest Physicians and the Society of College and University Planning. Please contact me for a conversation: james@productcommunity.us