4 steps to help association leaders turn innovative ideas into lasting impact
- Association teams tend to have innovative ideas to boost performance and member engagement, but may struggle to turn those ideas into lasting change due to overwork or lack of alignment.
- Adopting a structured, four-stage innovation blueprint can help you hone in on specific problems and solutions to focus on and create more excitement from inside your organization.
- Successfully implementing innovations or new ideas within your association is a process that requires ongoing support even after an innovation has been first introduced.
With members showing less interest in traditional conferences and other standard association offerings, association organizations need to innovate on strategy to avoid declining member numbers and engagement. But too often, innovation efforts fail.
Coming up with new ideas isn’t the problem here, as association leaders and their teams usually have ideas to spare. Where associations often struggle is implementation: taking a good idea to boost engagement or streamline internal workflows and then actually bringing it to fruition.
Keep reading to learn more about how associations can execute on innovation to drive impact.
Why does innovation often stall out inside associations?
You approve a new initiative. At the kickoff meeting, your team is excited. Then inboxes fill up, priorities shift and six months later, nothing has really changed.
This is a common scenario within association organizations, in part because they tend to run lean. Team members often wear multiple hats, juggling responsibilities and frequently struggling to balance day-to-day work with more forward-looking action to help the organization evolve.
In that kind of dynamic, the latter tends to lose out to the former. You may know that you need to follow through on upgrading your analytics capabilities or to rethink your association’s events strategy, but you just don’t have the bandwidth or energy to do it — or you need buy-in from a half dozen other stakeholders who are similarly busy.
So how can you more effectively implement positive change?
How can associations more effectively implement innovation and drive change?
Implementing innovative ideas within your association is partly a change management problem. And creating effective change starts with having an innovation blueprint or framework for action.
Faced with so many competing demands for time and attention, your team will be better able to follow through if you have a structure to guide what you do. Here are four key stages for your innovation blueprint or framework to incorporate:
- Stage 1: Clarity. Identify organizational problems and get your team aligned to solve them.
- Stage 2: Focus. Prioritize specific problems and solutions based on impact and feasibility.
- Stage 3: Action. Take action to implement your innovative solutions.
- Stage 4: Stickiness. Make your execution stick through training, communication, iteration and ongoing support.
In each of these stages, you may benefit from support from a third-party advisor who can help you create and implement your innovation blueprint.
Let’s dive into each element of the innovation blueprint framework in greater detail.
Stage 1: Clarity
To successfully innovate, you first need to know where your association is right now. This means assessing your current capabilities, organizational problems and gaps within your workflows.
Consider major association problem areas like:
- Disconnected from member needs: In an era of both generational and technological change, associations may be unsure of what their members actually want from them.
- Siloed data: associations frequently have data spread between their association management system (AMS), marketing platform, financial software and other core systems.
- Complex processes: Some systems may be automated, while others remain largely manual, like inputting data into spreadsheets.
- Lack of alignment: Leaders and team members may be siloed in their own understanding of how your organization operates and struggle to see certain operational realities.
- Lack of technical knowledge: Teams may lack the training to implement newer tech solutions like AI or advanced analytics.
Essentially, you want to think about what systems you have in place, where your data lives, how workflows operate and why certain bottlenecks exist. By doing this, you can create both organizational awareness and begin to generate buy-in around implementing new solutions.
Stage 2: Focus
After you’ve assessed organizational challenges in Stage 1, you need to figure out where to start making changes and how to do it. This is essentially where you make the leap from “that’s a problem” to “let’s solve it by doing this innovative idea”.
You’ve likely identified multiple problems by this point, but you can’t boil the whole ocean all at once. Try a pilot program like implementing more detailed analytics for a single event you’re putting on. When exploring a pilot, do a rapid analysis to consider:
- Feasibility: Is this problem something you can solve, and what solutions will be needed?
- Scope: How big of a lift will innovating here be?
- ROI: Does it make sense to invest resources here?
Do this kind of analysis for the major problems you identified in Stage 1 to prioritize how to address them. It will help you make sure your innovation is aligned with your organizational needs and generates more buy-in from your team.
Stage 3: Action
After identifying organizational problems and then prioritizing which problems to solve and finding innovative solutions, you’re ready to execute. This is where you take action to modernize core systems, integrate your data into a centralized data repository, introduce new automation tools, upgrade your analytics capacities or introduce a new offering to engage your membership.
If you try to rush into execution without doing the prior two stages — say, by hurrying to introduce the latest AI tool without first figuring out what it solves and whether the ROI makes sense — then this process can get messy and fall apart.
But if you’ve followed your innovation blueprint, the execution stage can actually feel simple. You know why you’re taking action and your team is aligned, at which point things tend to go relatively smoothly.
Stage 4: Stickiness
Most associations don’t fail at innovation because of bad ideas — they fail because they stop supporting change too early. Innovation isn’t a one-and-done. To make even the best new solutions, processes or adaptations stick around, you need to provide ongoing support.
After you’ve begun executing on a new innovation, keep the momentum going by incorporating:
- Change management: Creating processes to roll out your innovation to the individual teams or roles within your association organization.
- Training: Get your team members the training they need to understand and make use of any new solutions you’re introducing.
- Clear communication: Continuously communicate about why you’re innovating, how the change benefits your organization and how your team can help — and listen to team member feedback.
- Optimization: Tweak or adjust your execution as needed depending on how your initial rollout goes.
- Governance and accountability: Identify leaders and change champions to serve as point people on implementing innovations.
- KPIs: Figure out how you can measure results in order to identify what’s working and what may need adjustment.
The overall goal of stage 4 is to turn the transformation you begun during stage 3 into part of your association’s culture.
How Wipfli can help
We advise associations on innovation, navigating change and growth. Let’s talk about how you can move from intent to impact and turn your ideas into lasting transformation. Start a conversation.
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