I mentioned last week that the association blogosphere has been particularly hot lately. Last week I focused on Maddie Grant, and this week it's Jeff De Cagna. In between the amazing podcasts (Chris Sacca!) Jeff has put out some powerful posts, particularly this one about providing "deep support" to association members, which requires a deeper level of "intimacy."
On the deep support side, he suggests that we need to put more attention to helping members with three things: making sense, making meaning, and making decisions. These are important.
It's hard to make sense of the world today. I might actually combine a bit of what Jeff said about sense and meaning together. It's about figuring out what is REALLY going on, when we are bombarded with so much information from so many sources. It's about not taking things at face value, but pushing through to a deeper level of understanding. What are we doing as associations to really help members with that? Look at your current offerings. Is it really sense-making? Or is it confirming fear? Defending status quo? Providing random bits of wisdom?
Supporting members on making decisions seems obvious, I suppose, but I'm not sure we do it very often. We love to educate members, but do we ever really get to the level of making decisions? Not really. We teach them wonderful things. I've even done some of that teaching. But have I ever REALLY been close to one of my participants' decisions? This, I think, is the intimacy part. How do we actually get in, that close to where the actual decisions are made? I'm not sure, but I doubt it's going to happen through the standard lineup of magazine, conference, and e-newsletter.
Thanks, Jeff, for pushing the thinking.