Pursuing one-to-one: a new marketing mindset means doing business differently.

Editor's note: After my interview with Martha Rogers (see page 24 of the November issue of Association Management), I went looking for an association executive who could speak from firsthand experience about one-to-one marketing. I had the good fortune of finding Kerry C. Stackpole, CAE, president of The Association for Work Process Improvement, Boston. TAWPI has 1,247 members, who are senior executives and systems managers in Fortune 1000 companies, career executives in government agencies at all levels, and people in the data capture/service bureau business. TAWPI has a full-time staff of four and a budget of $1 million.

Stackpole explains why TAWPI is pursuing one-to-one marketing, how it's shaping strategic thinking as well as operational decisions, what the payoffs are, and what some of the self-discoveries are along the way.

- Ann I. Mahoney, CAE, Editor

The diversity in our membership - in terms of technologies, levels of responsibility, and organizations represented - has forced us to look hard at one-to-one marketing as a solution to addressing the needs of our audience.

Phase 1 - a survey. We began the one-to-one marketing process two years ago, with an old-fashion tool: a membership survey. We mailed a 12-page survey to all 1,200 (approximately) of our members, and about 700 surveys were returned.

While we asked lots of questions about members' experience with the association, more importantly, we asked about gender, age, length of service in the industry and in present position, compensation levels, education levels, primary areas of responsibility, and anticipated growth or decline in their organization in the next couple of years.

The survey let us begin collecting substantial data about who each member was and the environment in which each was operating.

Surprises and confirmations. You may discover, as we did, that members are sort of thumbing their noses at some services you thought were really valuable. We also had thought one segment of our membership was fading. The survey showed that the bulk of our membership was still in the business, and members even projected growth in the sector. We had been gearing ourselves for a different reality - one that didn't exist. So the member survey reminded us again of where we needed to be.

A demanding database. To make all this work, we had to create a database, and we brought in temporary help to do that. The challenge of maintaining a database is far greater than I would have anticipated. You probably need a full-time database administrator - the person who will make the adjustments and fine-tune the database. Changes on the fly don't work, so we have a new rule: Changes in the database have to be discussed in our staff meetings, where we can all talk about how the changes will affect us.

Phase 2 - monitoring participation. Our second piece in the one-to-one scheme was to correlate our member participation with our trade show participation to monitor overlap. Somewhat to our surprise, we discovered that 60 percent of the people who come to our trade show aren't members. Among the members, we found we have veterans who've been coming every year, as well as a lot of people who never come back. This information is changing the way we do business - the way we market ourselves and the show.

Phase 3 - market research. And a third step for us in adopting a one-to-one approach was market research. We talked to nonmembers and former members to understand what would make people join the association as well as why people walked away.

We discovered that some members walked away simply because we didn't reach out to them. We had people say to us, "I didn't know I wasn't a member anymore. My boss signs off on the membership, and I didn't realize he [or she] hadn't renewed me." It has to make you wonder when a member hasn't missed the magazine, the direct mail, and so forth. It began to paint a picture for us of the life of a typical member, who has an office full of paper and does not feel reached out to, no matter how much mail we send them.

This made us step back from the plate and reevaluate almost entirely the way we deal with our members.

We also discovered in the process of talking to former members that they had difficulty sometimes in selling membership to their senior management, so we began a process of collecting the names and telephone numbers of the supervisors. Now we can correspond directly with the supervisors to talk about the value of their staff participating in the association.

Target selling. Thus far, we've done just two forms of targeting: trying to re-attract members who haven't come to our annual meeting recently and trying to improve our renewal rates. We're focusing on these areas because our annual meeting is 65 percent of our revenue, and membership is about 20 percent.

Finding the best customers. We're now in the process of examining individual data to figure out who are our best customers, the biggest users of our services. This sometimes feels like a more difficult challenge in a membership organization than in the private sector, because indeed we can't "throw away" any members. But finding the person who is a multiple user of your services and products becomes critical. When a member calls the association, and you can say, "Oh, Mr. Smith, it's nice to hear from you," it feeds the one-to-one marketing notion. You can't underestimate how good someone feels when he or she feels known or recognized.

Meeting needs. After starting to merge member records with survey responses, we began to look at what we as an association were doing to meet member needs and expectations. We scheduled a board retreat to get at some of these issues, using the demographic information from the survey to let the board consider what the association should be doing to meet all these diverse needs. Following the retreat, we developed a full strategic plan, which included an analysis of subsets of our membership; we also began segmenting the potential industries that could be represented in our membership.

The payoff. One vivid example of where one-to-one marketing has started to pay off is in improved renewal rates. Our renewal rates typically run 70 percent a year, with 30 percent fall-off. In the first year of one-to-one, we came in at about 27 percent fall-off. I think this year we'll be closer to 22 percent, and we're aiming for 9 or 10 percent.

Our renewals are coming sooner. There's an enhanced communication as a result of the way we market membership renewal. We no longer assume the renewal; we market it. Our letters are individualized, personally signed, and focused on what people tell us they're interested in.

Another payoff is that complaints surface more quickly. Immediately after mailing the last batch of letters, which I personally signed, I heard from two members, which helped us avert future problems.

It's too early to prove yet, but I have a hunch that we're also beginning to see some improvement in the way people respond to our annual meeting. I say that because last year we were able to secure 41 registrations for the next annual meeting, sight unseen. That's a first for us.

The price. One-to-one marketing is more expensive in this sense: We've found that in order to speak to our members, we've had to raise the ante in the tools we use - which is to say that our promotional materials have to be better, we have to talk individually to diverse audiences. The messages and imagery have to be different.

My sense is that the return is going to be 10 times what it would have been if our association didn't go this way.

To me, the risk of trying one-to-one marketing pales compared to the relative danger of standing still. If we don't do anything, our customers will simply disappear. Yes, there's a higher cost for targeting who we're trying to reach, but we will gain members and markets we never had a foothold in before.