GSPM News

The secret to membership success is no secret - good communications

By David Rehr, Ph.D., GSPM Adjunct Professor and member of The Council on American Politics

We can never communicate too much with our association members. But the communications must be interesting and exceptional. Anything less wastes their valuable time and erodes their perception of the association.

So how can we, as CEOs, going forward this year remind our memberships of the great jobs we do for them, the value in their associations, and the importance of their financial support in the coming year, especially with our sluggish economy?

During my tenure at both the National Beer Wholesalers Association and the National Association of Broadcasters, these associations of maturing industries grew their memberships. I attribute much of the success to our strategies to improve the perception of association value.

Surprisingly, the strategies we employed were not overly expensive, but they required staff time and focus to execute, which led to a pay out of large dividends. Here are five ideas to generate strong membership returns in 2012:

1. Thank your membership for their support via email. Don’t make the email too short or too long. It must be authentic and sincere. And it should come from the CEO. Be sure the text appears when the email is opened. Nothing reduces “click through” more than visuals that aren’t necessary to the point. 

2. Call “key” industry leaders to personally thank them for association support. Ask each of your staff to call 20 to 30 of your most important industry leaders to personally thank them. The CEO should lead by example and take the top 50 or more. They will likely be shocked that you are calling and are not asking for anything. If they are unavailable, leave a short and positive voice mail.

3. Post a note on the association’s Facebook page thanking association members for their support. You’ll probably cover most of your membership via email but those members who are more social media-oriented will appreciate the note. You can use the same messaging as your membership email.

4. Send a written letter to all members outlining the prior year’s accomplishments. This was one of the best communication tools used by the NAB team. The staff already was working on a report of annual goals, so the information was at hand. We drafted a letter that was sent to TV network CEOs that was comprehensive and interesting about the team’s successes on Capitol Hill, and other things, such as the association’s rebranding and how broadcasting could fully exploit new technologies. The message to members is the association is making a real difference because of their financial support.

5. Create excitement for your organization by making your forthcoming annual report a communication worth reading. Often, it appears that we allow our accountants to design our annual reports. They all look the same, and, frankly, they are not very interesting. Make yours stand out. One of my favorites that received great acclaim from the beer industry as well as in Washington was an NBWA report that was die cut to look like a beer keg. For some associations, that might be a little bold but the point is that if the report is not visually appealing, no one will read it – a big waste of money and staff time. For 2012, think of your annual report as a sales tool designed to maintain as well as increase membership. That is exactly what we experienced at both associations.

There are no secrets to improving the perception of value for your association. It takes CEO leadership, creativity from your team, an honest reassessment of your communication practices, as well as hard work. But it pays tremendous dividends.

Rehr is the former CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters and the National Beer Wholesalers Association. He is an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University. Contact him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

How do you measure Capitol Hill influence?

By David Rehr, Ph.D., GSPM Adjunct Professor and member of The Council on American Politics

With 72,000 associations, more than 4,000 political action committees, and nearly 17,000 people vying for the time and attention of members of Congress, how do we know when our efforts are making an impact?

We spend our association members’ money on media and messaging, hire staff to go to Congress, engage grassroots constituents back home to talk up the issues, raise money for candidate re-elections, and spend countless hours at coalition meetings on strategy, but so do all of the other groups seeking to educate, persuade and influence Capitol Hill. And that doesn’t include all the law firms and PR agencies whose staffs walk the corridors of power.

How do we measure our true influence?

Certainly, you can use a matrix to examine your “win/lose” record, or the number of times you meet individually with lawmakers, or how many association issue papers are left in congressional offices. But real influence is having the representative and staff really know and care about your organization as revealed by these five questions:

1. Does the representative and staff keep my association “top of mind”? Could I rank myself or my organization in the top-10 best friends with the representative or key staff? 

2. Will the member of Congress or staff proactively reach out to my organization for critical information before taking action on an issue? Do you hear from the office regularly – by phone and email, and do they search you out at events? Do Hill staff want to know your position without you having to provide it before a committee hearing, conference meeting or before a vote?

3. Does the representative and staff stay in close touch with your membership back home? Does he or she proactively talk about your association members’ meetings during district work periods when you and your staff see them in Washington?

4. Is the member of Congress and staff using language that “frames” your association’s issue in everyday conversation? While at NAB, I remember having a meeting on Capitol Hill where an unsympathetic Hill staffer referred to our issue as the “performance tax,” which was the way we defined the broadcasters’ battle to prevent the record labels from imposing a fee on radio stations that play music. Experiences like those demonstrated how we successfully “framed” the issue and how it would be understood – advantage NAB.

5. Will the representative and staff be concerned about the consequences of being against my organization? As a former Hill staffer, my job was to determine the cost/benefit to my boss if we supported or opposed a particular organization. That’s why groups such as the AFL-CIO, National Rifle Association, AARP or the US Chamber and others exercise influence on Capitol Hill because they effectively communicate congressional positions with their members.

It takes time to have this depth of support in Congress. But it is what we should all strive for to have real influence as public policy debates move forward.

Teaching Campaigning in Cairo

GSPM professors teach practical skills to emerging politicians in Egypt.

Feb. 2, 2012

By Laura Donnelly-Smith

Jason Linde, M.A. ’95, stood in a Cairo classroom in front of a group of Egyptian political party members, preparing to talk to them about managing a campaign. The students in his group were part of a class of about 80 representing more than a dozen political parties, ranging from the established far-right Al-Nour party to newly formed secular parties that had only been in existence for a few months.

“I was standing up there, thinking that a meeting like we were having here would have been illegal a year ago,” Mr. Linde said. “You couldn’t meet with more than two or three people. We were able to see a new birth of freedom, and it was an honor and a privilege.”

Mr. Linde, who is chief of staff for Rep. Janice Hahn, D-Calif., is also an adjunct faculty member in GW’s Graduate School of Political Management. He traveled to Egypt Jan. 8-12 with four other GSPM faculty members to spend five days teaching best practices in political management to emerging Egyptian politicians and activists.

The course, called “Managing Campaigns in an Election Environment,” was originally conceived by Bill Adams, a professor in the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, who visited the American University in Cairo (AUC) last spring. Faculty members there were unaware that GW had a school specifically dedicated to political management, and when Dr. Adams told them about it, they were eager to learn more.

So Dr. Adams enlisted Dr. Christopher Arterton, a professor of political management and founding dean of GSPM, to put together a proposal for a short course in political management specifically for Egyptian political party staffers. The proposal was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in November, and AUC organized the details for the course. During GW’s winter break, the faculty members headed to Cairo.

“The students included a lot of people who had been active a year ago in bringing down the Mubarak regime,” Dr. Arterton explained. “Many had been in the streets and in Tahrir Square.”

The program’s goal was to provide the students with tools and principles that they could immediately put to use, he said. Egypt is currently about halfway through a long process of building a participatory democracy. The first step was to remove President Mubarak, and the next was to elect members to the lower house of Parliament. Currently, Egyptians are involved in electing members for the upper house of Parliament, and later this year, there will be a period of constitution writing and, eventually, presidential elections.

Most of the students were mid-level leaders in their respective parties, working hard to get their candidates elected—but without having ever had any formal training in campaign management, Dr. Arterton said. So he recruited faculty members who could provide practical skills the students could use immediately—including how to develop a campaign budget, how to write a short “stump speech” detailing a candidate’s platform, and how to design television, print and Internet political ads.

About 80 percent of the Egyptian students understood some English, and about a third were comfortable speaking it. Faculty and students used simultaneous translation headsets to facilitate communication so that participants could speak in whatever language they were most comfortable using.

Nancy Bocskor, a campaign coach and board member for Running Start, an organization that encourages young women to enter public service, taught fundraising and campaign budgeting. Veteran Democratic media consultant Peter Fenn, founder of Fenn Communications Group, taught a module on developing strong messages for political ads.

“When [a country’s political system] is just starting out, there can be a lot of personality-driven parties,” Mr. Fenn said. “We asked the students, ‘What does your party want to say? What makes it unique?’”

One of the course’s most dramatic moments came when Mr. Fenn asked the students to break into groups and design an ad campaign for a fictional “jobs and economy” focused party. The students were sitting with others from their own and like-minded parties—a table of Al-Nour party members, a table of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party members and a table of secularists. Mr. Fenn asked the students to count off and reassigned them to new groups of mixed political ideologies, even though he knew this would cause friction. In a blog posting he published on the U.S. News & World Report website, he described what happened next.

“When each of the three teams returned from their breakout groups to present their ideas, they were ecstatic,” he wrote. “‘We still are the revolution,’ they said, ‘and we must work together.’” The assignment had forced them to refocus on their similarities—the ones that had brought them together a year before—rather than the differences that had divided them since, he said.

GSPM adjunct faculty member Kathleen Schafer, founding principal of Leadership Connection, a consulting firm that teaches people to be better leaders and speakers, focused on helping the students learn what was, for most of them, an entirely new type of communication. While the students were extremely Internet-savvy and familiar with Facebook and Twitter, they’d never before been asked to present their candidates’ ideas in a succinct, face-to-face conversation, Ms. Schafer said.

“Most of the presentations they’ve heard have been in a religious context,” she explained. “So we did exercises to identify their strengths and make them feel more comfortable speaking about politics to a group. I helped them understand the idea of a stump speech—how to say, in two or three minutes, what they’re doing in a way that inspires and engages their audience.”

The students did remarkably well, considering that they weren’t even allowed to talk publicly about politics a year ago, Ms. Schafer said. And while there was initially some tension and hesitation among some of the students, they worked through it quickly.

“The camaraderie in the group was pretty incredible. There was tension, but they understood that they were all working for the same things: freedom and democracy.”

About 15 students of the 80 were women, representing many different points on the political spectrum. Several women from a conservative party wore burqas with only their eyes visible, while more moderate women covered only their heads or wore Western-style business clothing, Dr. Arterton said. Ms. Schafer said several of the women told her how much they appreciated being able to learn politics from a woman.

“It was one of the most phenomenal teaching experiences I’ve ever had, and I’ve done a lot of international teaching,” she said.

Dr. Arterton said he hopes that GSPM’s connections with Egypt and the American University in Cairo are not limited to this course. “If they’re interested, we would like to help AUC start a more permanent program,” he said. “We’ve helped institutions in Italy and Latin America start similar programs—it’s part of our mission.”

And for the Egyptian leaders who completed the course, it was a chance for both a new political beginning and new international friendships.

“I think the students were quite thrilled,” Dr. Arterton said. “They were very appreciative of us. All of the faculty members have been asked to be friends on Facebook. I have about 60 new Egyptian friends.”