Laura Coscarelli discusses Building Community with Charlotte Kemp

Welcome to the association edition of Futures Facets. My name is Charlotte Kemp. I am the association's futurist, and I like to talk to really interesting people around the world who can give us some sort of insight into some of the priorities we have as association executives, very often as volunteer association leaders who come into these roles with very little association experience. So today we found an expert, Laura Coscarelli from Higher Logic in the United States of America. Joining us today to talk about sustaining member engagement all year round through community. This is a fantastic topic. In my own association of the Professional Speakers Association of Southern Africa, member engagement is a high priority that we're always trying to learn about. So we're really glad to have you with us today, Laura. Thank you.

Great. Thanks for having me.

Good. Laura, before we get into that, why don't we just start a little bit with how did you end up in this space? Why are you working with communities and membership-type associations and organizations?

Yeah, that's, that's actually the most common question I get. So what I always say is no one went to college to become a community manager. We all just sort of ended up, ended up in this role and solving a critical problem that we encountered. So just for me, I was a German major in college. I had no idea what I wanted to do. And I ended up doing Teach for America after college. I taught middle school science in North Philly. And I, I completely burned out. It was an incredibly humbling and difficult experience for me. And so I really wanted to do one job, do and do it really well. So at the time, almost 14 years ago, it was really revolutionary to put internet— put lessons on the internet, to put digital curriculum online. And so now we assume, of course, that teachers are Zooming in from class and they're teaching online. And so I worked for a company that developed digital curriculum for teachers. But I felt— and it was really luxurious to be able just to do one thing and focus on writing and developing incredible lessons all day. But I, over time, I felt really disconnected. I had no idea how teachers were using my lessons or any idea how these were actually translating into the classroom. So I went to work at a really small nonprofit. We had a staff of no more than 7 people at any given time. So we had a really, really small team, and I was running a professional development program for teachers all across the DC region. And I was trying to find workforce partners to volunteer with our teachers, and I was trying to understand how our teachers were doing in between our workshops. I was trying to communicate with them and share resources, and I simply had absolutely no way to do that effectively. And so I had an incredible leader who understood the power of community. This was very, very early on. There was no— I don't think CMX existed. There was no— there were some very, very early platforms that I was using, and I was just trying to solve a problem for myself as I was running an education program at this really tiny nonprofit. And so I failed at first. I had no idea what I was doing. I posted, no one responded. I didn't select the right platform at first because I didn't ask for feedback. I over-segmented. I made all of the classic mistakes that now I know that's not, that's not the best way to go about it. But eventually I talked to my teachers and I asked them what they, what are they trying to accomplish? We found the right platform. We got people posting, we got our partners in there. And so eventually over time, I was able to really start to demonstrate the effectiveness and it was simply the only way that I could get it done. And so that's something that I've since now I've worked with different organizations building national networks of teachers. And then when I came to Higher Logic, I, I really wanted to show the power of community, not just for teachers, because that's really where I had focused for so long. And since then, I've been able to work with other nonprofits and bankers and minority business owner nonprofits and cheerleaders. And so everyone needs community, everyone, especially at the organizational level, everyone's trying to solve these same problems of building an engaged network, connecting their members, trying to support their learning, build emotional connection, and even do blended work, but blending in-person and workshop and conferences with the online community too. So those basic principles are really all the same, but really just about being able to— how do you get, how do you get this work done? How do you manage your relationships with members? How do you understand their needs? And how do you communicate and share resources? And those are really just the common problems that I've seen, um, that all of these organizations at whatever size, they're trying to solve through community.

All right. Wow. Such a beautiful comprehensive response, Laura. Thank you. You mentioned that you burnt out at a certain stage in your career, and I think that might be an important place to start with because especially with volunteer-led organizations who don't have a big staff, people get involved, and if they're passionate about their association, they get overly involved, and it's very easy to be trying so hard to kind of help the association to evolve and to kind of catch up with things or to respond to a crisis like COVID, that we do kind of run the risk of our leaders burning out during a crisis like this. And what I keep trying to tell myself and my colleagues is that associations are almost by definition a co-creation of peers coming together to say this body should exist. To serve us. Now, obviously, there are some bodies that are legislated that they need to exist, but most of our associations and memberships and community groups are people coming together to co-create. And then it is automatically a community, but it can be a faulty community. And it can be one without engagement if we don't know how to do it properly. So I think maybe having an understanding of what that engagement looks like practically, not the platforms, but How do we get our members engaged so that those people on the edges feel more like more ownership of what is going on? And the more they experience that, then the more they contribute, and then we can evolve.

Yeah, and I think the unique challenges around volunteer member-led associations, it can feel different because maybe there's a different structure of authority, different budgeting, different organizations, different organizational structure in the way that the work gets done. But at the core, what I've seen for— we have a number of groups that are volunteer-led. And so I think, so first of all, what you highlight, I think is so powerful, which is that people are there because they really want to be there. And so they feel so strongly about it. They're there, it's their own time, they're volunteering, they're giving so much. And so I think for those organizations, what we see kind of going back to that burnout idea, it's really just about being able to focus and prioritize and say, you have permission to not do everything at once. You don't have to take on everything. But let's also get you the right— just by getting the right tools, those organizations can scale, because it can be so, so difficult for volunteers after a very long day at their main job. They have families. Well, now I have to go deal with all of these spreadsheets, and I have to send these emails through Outlook, and I have to try to get people— I have to get back to somebody because they couldn't log into Zoom because we're trying to have a meetup, and I'm trying to post on Facebook. And so it can be really hard for those organizations if they are volunteer-led. If they don't have a single source, that's what we've really seen for organizations that have shifted to Higher Logic who are volunteer-led, is that being able to have just one almost centralized dashboard to manage the entire organization experience, the entire membership experience, all of the communications, all of the resources by putting everything in one place. That's really what— that's what it's designed for, really small organizations to be able to scale. And I actually know one organization we work with, they have one, one, one staff member, and she's been able to really lean into the community. And what you can do by starting a community on one single platform, not in all of these other little places, is that you can start to hand over some of that control for even just scheduling events or managing events or having members support each other and get back to each other and answer each other's questions. You actually start to disperse some of that day-to-day work of running the association, especially if it's volunteer-led. And by creating more leadership opportunities for other people to step up and say, you know what, I noticed you answered 10 questions in the last week, that's incredible, that's— let's, let's make you a volunteer moderator of the community, let's get you in here, let's create another way for you to engage it. But also now you're actually taking back some of that work that typically would have had to been done one-on-one responding to emails really tediously by that volunteer staff too. So what you can start to do is create more opportunities now for more of those members to sort of bubble up and be able to support each other, but you're also minimizing the amount of work for that volunteer staff too. But it really comes down to being able to centralize that community and create a central single space and a source of truth for that overall member experience.

Oh, I mean, that's incredible. It's kind of the arguments that we've been making within our Professional Speakers Association for some time, trying to get rid of a lot of the manual work that we're having to do. And because we're volunteers and we're spending time in our day jobs and trying to, you know, get our own careers going, And then when it comes to the association work, we feel it's very difficult to hand over, to delegate to somebody else if you don't have that central place of control so you can see what is going on. Because if you delegate and that person is, you know, running their own business or perhaps going through their own crisis with something, then we can't tell. So we spent the last 2 years really working on our systems, centralizing our systems, defining what they are. And yeah, I wish I'd known about HayaLogic before, but I think we finally got there. And the relief to say, like, 90% of the manual work we were doing, you know, in the last decade is now automated. And it is such a relief to us. And now we can start to talk about the really important things like, what does our community really need? How do we create those relationships? How do we get strategic? How do we start to really practice some advocacy on behalf of our industry. And we haven't had the opportunity to do that before because we've been doing admin work essentially. And it's been very frustrating. Yeah.

And that's so, so common. And that's— so first of all, I'm so happy to hear that. I'm so happy to hear—

Thank you.

Make some progress on that because that's exactly right. That's what we hear all the time is that it's not about taking away— what are you going to do with that time that you get back, right? If I don't have to do these manual spreadsheets, I don't have to send another webinar reminder blasting everybody again. What can I do if I don't have to spend that time doing one-on-one emails to members, trying to get them set up with their passwords or do some sort of tedious work? I get all of that time back, and now I can do higher-level strategy. I can do the fun work. I can maybe make some time to actually talk to members or do this other programming that I didn't have time to do before. So it's not about less work. It's about different work, and it's about more meaningful work. And it's really because you can start to lean on the platform to Get everybody started and the welcome email is automatically sent out. And we can send, we can use, we have a feature called automation rules where we can say, we miss you. There's an email that goes out for someone who hasn't posted in 90 days. Let's bring you back in. And I can even get people in the right groups. I don't have to pester them because I can automatically add everybody to the community. And that's just something that I cannot, I cannot do that on a Facebook group. I cannot do that on a Slack group. And so you can really just start to lean on the automations within the system. to not just help people get started, but have a better experience. And then also, also start to delegate too. And you don't have to do everything, and you can leave your incredibly passionate members who are there because they really, really want to be there. And I think that's what's so powerful, especially about association communities, is that everyone has this shared interest. They all have these things in common. They are so desperate to talk about a profession or a skill or a hobby that they just feel so strongly about. And so So I think that's just the real possibility here is to create that space for people to connect and collaborate. But it's simply, it's not even about more work. It's actually less work now for your team too. And so I think that's really just the magical combination that we're going for. That's really when I see this work best, especially for volunteer-led association organization.

Oh, that's incredible. One of the things we found to be very useful is we have just 5 chapters in our association and there's leadership teams in each of those chapters. And then they sit on our exec. And we always have that succession plan problem that we don't have enough leaders with experience. And sometimes somebody decides to leave the industry altogether to change direction in their careers. And then we have this gap again. And not for this reason, for another reason, we started masterminds. So the masterminds are really casual, relaxed. They're not all rules-based like the chapters. There's not a formal structure, but there's just people coming together around a topic area. So we got one for book writing for professional speakers or podcasting for professional speakers. We've got a women's speakers group. We've got a language group. So people who speak in other than English, how do they, you know, promote their careers in it? And through all of those masterminds and speak classes and other things, we've suddenly discovered one of the benefits has been a new layer of potential leaders coming out of those masterminds. Because mastermind is just, again, peers agreeing to create something. But you have a champion, the person who makes sure that the meeting is there, checks on the people who aren't, you know, attending, organizes a few things. And because they're kind of communicating between EXCO and their group, they start to get a bit of insight into how the association works. So for our first time ever, we're facing our association AGM in a month's time, and we've got more leaders, more volunteers putting their hand up to serve than we need, than we've ever had before. And it's just an incredible problem to have, to have more capable people than we've had in the past, even though our membership has taken a bit of a knock with COVID So it's been that opportunity to allow other people those leadership roles. With less pressure. It's a wonderful way to get that engagement and to— and then that ownership again of, you know, this is our association where we're making it happen.

That's amazing. I love that story.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's so cool. And I think what you really— what you've hit on there is that members are not all alike. Leadership can look and feel and be manifested in a lot of different ways. And leadership, I think, for organizations that haven't really discovered community or haven't really explored this, Historically, this idea of leadership or engagement typically means just a very, very few things. It means I'm a part of a committee, I'm a chapter leader, I'm on the board, and I go to the conference every year. And that's about it. Maybe I publish, maybe I submit to a publication if the organization even has a publication. And that's it. And those are very limited. That's a very small group of spots available for engagement and for leadership. And even the conference requires a lot of pretty big investment of time and money. And so what you're doing here now, and I think what we've seen organizations— the positive of COVID is that in the move to virtual events and the move to communities, there's even more and more ways now for members to sort of take that first step and engage in a different way. And it doesn't even have to be a formal commitment or many, many hours. Even just simply the act of logging on and liking someone else's post or responding to a discussion, that's engagement. And that is now they're finding value. They've had a connection point with other members in the organization. It didn't have to be this huge commitment. It didn't have to be taking 3 days to fly to the conference. But I think what you're doing here now is what I love is that you're building this pipeline for future leaders. But in the meantime, they're finding value in that relationship that they're having with each other and with your association. So it's just all about the value and creating even more opportunities for people to kind of take that first step to becoming, to finding, to finding each other, and to finding the other nerds in their tribe as they're finding it, just like being able to explore and sort of nerd out on these topics that they absolutely love.

Yeah, no, that's exciting. And what I loved was we had so many good reasons to start the Mastermind, and then we discovered the value of this, this leadership pipeline, and it was an absolute bonus for us. Lori, tell us your experience. You mentioned, you know, our virtual experiences now, because so many of us are at home and we're having to connect virtually. For our association as professional speakers, we all want to be on stages. So About this time last year, around the world, all of my speaking friends and colleagues, our calendars were just wiped out. You know, within a space of a week, we were all absolutely without work. It was quite a scary time. But our association had— we've been experimenting with a lot of things because we're down here in Southern Africa. So we're really far from all the activity and most of our colleagues up in the Northern Hemisphere. And So we've been practicing being online and inviting speakers from around the world to come and address us. And so we've had the kind of hybrid meeting thing going for, for a couple of years, and we've experimented in our conventions with hybrid kind of style speakers and things. So we've had that experience. And when, when we needed to go online, our whole association moved within 24 hours. We were all online, all our meetings were online, and we just carried on without a hitch. There was no problem. Not all of our members were able to do that, but what our members and our broader community beyond our members, what we're experiencing now is the incredible benefit of being able to connect with and form professional relationships with our colleagues around the world. So now we're talking with, you know, India, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Canada today. You know, myself and my colleagues today have had those conversations with those kinds of colleagues around the world. So it's enriching our experience. But from your perspective, in terms of building community, what has COVID and lockdowns and the inability to travel, meet in person, what has that effect been on the communities that you're working with?

It's been powerful. It's been a really wild year. And I think what I love is I don't know where it goes next. And that's been a lot of the conversations that I've been having with organizations. Especially this year, is we don't know where we're going to be in a year. But in terms of what we've all learned, I think it's exactly right. What I've seen organizations— I have seen them move mountains over the last year to just pop it up and change and really adopt a mindset of problems are opportunities. We never planned to cancel all of our conferences and lose all of that revenue. I know it's been pretty devastating for a lot of organizations. But then the positive to this is organizations are open to change and open to adopting new technologies in a way that they have never been before. I think there's an openness and a willingness willingness to change and experiment and try new things. To get— let's just get on the Zoom. Let's say take a more experimental mindset to the work that we're doing, which I don't always historically see with associations too. So I think what I see is associations acting much more like startups, which has been really cool to see. Because ultimately what they're trying to do is serve their members, and they're willing to go to all ends and be moving as quickly as they possibly can to simply keep serving their members too. And I think what you've highlighted here too is that, again, problems are opportunities, that organizations have stumbled into this understanding that they actually have a global audience reach now. And so it's not just about the members who were historically part of them, or maybe based especially for regional groups or even national groups. And there's one group I'm talking to now in a state that they've historically always worked— they've always really just kind of focused on the local people in their communities or within their state. And what they realized is by hosting these virtual events, they have people signing up from all over the country and the world. So now, well, what do you do with that? And I think that's the next question is, how do you harness that for organizations, especially that have maybe more of a locally based or a smaller sort of geographical regional base to their work? What do you do now that you've uncovered this audience base? You have this incredible opportunity to— and it's not just about generating revenue, but increasing engagement. Who are also really interested in this that maybe weren't on your radar or wouldn't have come to you before. And so I think that's the sort of next challenge for organizations. It's not just about we send the email inviting everyone to the Zoom and we have the virtual conference. Well, how do we have a larger long-term digital engagement strategy that allows us to harness this interest at a global level? And that's the really— that's where I see organizations sort of— they don't have a path forward necessarily. Some do, some really understand that. They have a robust email program, they have an online community, they have virtual events, they're really able to start to make that transition to serve an even broader audience. But some organizations are still kind of getting organized in terms of their technology, but they're starting to at least ask that question of how can we start to reach even more people? And so what do we do now? And so these— we never kind of expected this to happen, but we have this huge opportunity ahead of us. And so how can we embrace it and really make sure we have the right tools to harness our global community now? That we definitely didn't see a year ago. That was not the plan.

Wow. And that's a lovely strategic conversation for them to have because when you're challenged, faced with a challenge like that, you can decide to grow and expand and scale and embrace all of that, or you have to redefine yourself as the local body. And once you know that, then it's easier to really kind of deliver on your mission because you know what it is you're trying to achieve. Even if sometimes you're going to have some visitors from another part of the world who you some flavor, you still know who you're serving. And yeah, and again, that's the kind of strategic conversation we can have if we've dealt with all of the kind of the administration part of it and made it easier. Laura, you shared with me a really fascinating blog post, which I've read through, and I will share the link in our show notes so people can read through this. But why don't you just give us a few steps? You were talking about how to build 6 steps for sustaining community engagement year-round. Do you want to just kind of maybe touch on one or two of those ideas, maybe your favorite ones that we can think about community engagement?

Yeah, so in terms of this is— I wrote this blog, I think around COVID time when we were doing a lot of reflecting around how do we sort of harness exactly what we were just talking about. How do we harness this energy? We saw communities see double-digit increases in engagement, especially around the beginning of COVID And so It was a question for us, well, how do you sustain this now? How do we keep people coming back, especially as they're experiencing so much isolation? And so I think the first one is, is it's really about going back to the strategy. And so what I've seen organizations do is not just pivot the way that they manage their events, but at a higher level, entire business models are being revisited. Historically, organizations that have generated incredible, incredible portions of their revenue from in-person conferences have had to completely shift their business strategy and say, well, actually, let's— we really need to invest in an LMS now. We need to have online courses. We need to find other ways to engage our sponsors and get that revenue back. So I think it really goes back to making sure that at a leadership level, we have an updated strategic plan that then we can match the technology to. So it's not about rushing into technology investments. It's really making sure, well, what is our business model now? Maybe we need to generate revenue and manage our business in a completely different way moving forward after COVID. And let's make sure we have the staff to align to that, we have the resources, and that includes the technology too. So I've seen a lot of organizations really take a step back and either revise their strategic plans or totally start fresh because they, they've had to really be able to pivot in the way that they do business moving forward. So that's been really, really exciting. And that's been probably the more interesting conversations I've had over the last year too, is really opening it up into a completely new business model for associations, even the volunteer-led ones too. And then I think alongside with it, my favorite step is always interviewing community members. I think that's something that can always get lost. And when I was a community manager, I always tried to just do at least one, at least one 30-minute interview a week to really make sure that I always had that time to step aside. It's one thing, it's one thing to connect in the community and exchange emails, but even just kind of taking conversations like Charlotte, like we're doing today, just to be able to actually have a conversation with someone is so important. And it builds so much trust and so much understanding. And when I did it when I was a community manager, I would get on with our, with some of our customers. And so, and they would say, I can't believe there's someone from the organization who wants to talk to me. That's amazing. I'd say, no, I'm happy to talk to you. So it's just to create a real human touchpoint. There's simply nothing that replaces an actual Zoom-to-Zoom typically conversation, a face-to-face conversation to really connect and just, and just listen. And that's the entire point of the conversation is just to listen and understand about that member's And that just allowing them to feel heard and feel valued by a staff member or someone in the organization, or even just another volunteer, someone just to say, tell me about your experience. How is it going? What do you need that you don't have? Just creating that space, even just 30 minutes a week, is incredibly, incredibly powerful. And it truly means so much for that other community member too.

Yeah, no, that's a really good answer. I know we've— a lot of associations at the beginning of COVID they just started communicating just sending so many emails out. And obviously with, uh, with our association, because we went online, we've got 4 physical chapters and 1 virtual chapter. So now we were all virtual and people could go to any meeting. And then there were all the masterminds and everything else. And people were going, there's just too much information, too much communication coming at us. Uh, and so we kind of streamlined our, our kind of marketing of the events and spent more time, like you're saying, having these conversations and amongst our leadership, taking time to connect with 1 or 2 people at a time and hearing their stories. And that has really— it's, first of all, it's been heartbreaking hearing some of those stories, but to really understand what our colleagues are going through and how we can share it, it's been amazing. And I think it really has made our association a lot more robust. So I also highly recommend that strategy.

That's amazing. And I think having those small groups too, that's, first of all, that's amazing that you do that. And that's very, it's very rare. That's incredibly, incredibly rare to see organizations do that. And I think also having that smaller group time or even one-on-one time is such a luxury for people to really feel heard by the leadership. And something that I was— it just, that just tells me so much about the culture of your organization too. And so that's something that I say, the really the only indicator that tells me that an organization is not ready for an online community is if that organization has a toxic relationship with their members. And I, it's very rare, but I have encountered that. And so A community doesn't fix the toxicity of an organization. If the staff hates the members and the members hate the staff, and there's— if there's a cultural issue underlying all of that, the cultural issues will not be fixed by an online community. It will simply amplify it. And so at an organizational level, that's just to look for. It's, again, it's very rare in most associations, especially membership-based organizations, especially volunteer ones. Typically organizations just have incredible relationships with their members, and then there's just such an opportunity there just to amplify the positivity, the collaboration, the connection that they have, and all of that cultural goodness will just simply be manifested online. So I'm just so happy to hear that your approach at your organization, it just sounds really aligned to what I've seen from the most incredible associations who have been able to build that community online. Just listening, just listening to members and creating that space.

Oh, lovely. Yeah, Laura, thank you very much. That's a nice encouragement to us as well. Laura, so Higher Logic works both with associations and with corporates in terms of their membership programs. Just as we kind of close off, maybe you wanna tell us what it is if somebody wanted to come to you for some help, how could you help them whether they were an association or a corporate? What would that look like if they were coming to you for some assistance?

Yeah. So we work with organizations that are all trying to solve those same problems of engaging their, whether they're their members or their customers, there's a network of people that they're trying to serve. And they're trying to do it easier, better, and faster. And so at the staff level, what we can do, whether you're a customer success manager or a product team on the corporate side, or you're an association, you're a membership person or a marketing person on the association side, what we can do is just try to match you with the right technology to continue to nurture and grow those relationships. So if you're trying to help your members or your customers communicate better, connecting them with each other, sharing resources, managing events, those are all things that we can do through our tool. But it's really just a matter of It's an incredibly powerful tool that can meet a lot of different use cases, but it's really just a matter of what are your business goals at the organization, what are you trying to achieve, and where are you running into pain points as you're especially trying to nurture and grow and manage your relationships with your members. And so it's really about organizations— there's a lot of outbound communication, but it's very rare if I ask an organization and say, well, how if I'm a member and I have another question and I'm trying to get an answer from another member, someone who's doing this work right now, how would I do it? And then the organization says, well, you can't, you can't, that's not possible. Well, that's really just an incredible opportunity for community, because what we can start to do is create, create opportunities for members to support each other directly without any barriers. And so that's really the power here is that members want to hear from each other, customers want to hear from each other, these are the people who are directly engaged in that work. And so what we can do is remove, remove as many barriers as possible to them being able to connect directly with each other. And it's just about having the Wow.

No, fascinating. Well, I'm going to highly recommend people come chat to you about some of these issues because it, like I said, you know, once we started to solve these or address these, at least in our association, it's made such a huge difference. So Laura, thank you very much for sharing with us today.

Great. It was great to hear about your work. I'm so excited about your work too. And especially, especially over the last year, I know it's been a huge challenge for organizations with COVID So it sounds like you've been able to pivot and be a startup and just be able to talk to members and connect them virtually and find this incredible global audience ahead of you too.

Yes. Oh, thank you. Well, in my closing statement, I'll just kind of summarize what we've done. Our outgoing president is a woman called Joni Peddie, and she works with emotional intelligence. And I'm the incoming president. So I take over in April this year. And I'm a futurist. And so between the two of us, we've been having some really very strategic conversations about what it is we're trying to do with this association and how we want to engage with our members. And we spent lots of, lots of time this last year talking with our members one by one and really understanding. And it's been fascinating. I think the best thing we've done is created a very cohesive leadership team that allowed us to have these conversations and also to work out because our succession plan was, was quite firm over the for the association leadership, not for the chapters, but the association leadership, it meant that we could start plans 2 years ago with our previous, our immediate past president. And the plans and strategy that he started, Joni's taken forward and then I'm taking forward and I'm gonna pass on to the person who comes after me. And that inherited set of values and strategy has really set us up for really great success. So it's been fantastic. And yeah, I'm enjoying this work more than I have for a very long time. Even, you know, COVID notwithstanding, it's been a very tough year with COVID and I know for a lot of association colleagues it's been very, very difficult. All right. So folks, as we end, I'm going to invite you to connect with Laura Coscarelli, and her contact details and information will be in the show notes. And if you'd like to talk to me, Charlotte Kemp, about a future strategy for your association, You're very welcome to connect with me. You can find me on LinkedIn as well as on charlottekemp.co.za.