Smooth The Path

Member Informed Strategy, Innovation & Marketing

  • Home
  • Speaking
    • Presentations
    • Upcoming Events
    • Happy Event Organizers
    • Happy Participants
  • Services
    • Clients
  • Resources
    • Associations of the Future
    • New Member Engagement Study
    • Association Industry Innovation Research Study
    • New Strategies for Member Onboarding, Engagement, and Retention E-book
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact

February 6, 2019 By Amanda Kaiser

Slogging Through the Routine Grind

Every day we slog through the routine grind of making lunches, pulling unwilling kids out of bed, and getting them off to school. We fight traffic to get to the office and the minute we arrive an inbox of email awaits us. Meetings dot our calendar and our day is already pre-planned. The routine grind is demanding. It pulls us in and focuses us on our stuff. Our work, our problems, our goals, and our to-dos for today.

The big opportunity for us as association professionals is to do the hard work of pulling up out of the routine grind and focus on our members. Their work, their problems, their goals, and their to-dos for today. We are not our members, so anticipating what we would do in their situation does not work but, cultivating curiosity about them does work. What happens when we rewrite this email? Oh, we just discovered a problem members are having, can we solve it this way?

This kind of work is gratifying but it is also difficult so, the trick is to remember to switch from an us-focus to a member-focus often, so often that eventually it becomes more effortless.

Member-focused ideas:

  • Associations please help fix time-poverty
  • Improve the member experience with curated networking
  • Work to network

Filed Under: Association Strategy Tagged With: curious, empathy, member focus, member focused, member problems, slog

Follow

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Sign up for member insights & association inspiration.

Work With Me

Recent Posts

Association Strategy
Association Marketing
Association Innovation
Association Leadership
Association Value
Member Experience

Member Engagement
Member Research
Member Insights
Conference
Membership

Member Research

Blog

About

Happy Clients

Speaking

Popular Presentations

Contact Us

More Resources

Copyright © 2021 Amanda Kaiser