membership growth

An eLABorate Topics x 2024 Lab Manager Leadership Summit Collaboration!

Welcome back to another exciting episode of eLABorate! Today's episode is an epic collaboration with the 2024 Lab Manager Leadership Summit featuring two of the Summit's most influential leaders, Scott Hanton, and Michelle Hoad, joining as our special guests.

In today's episode, we will explore:

- The transformation in leadership and managerial roles within the laboratory space, as discussed by Scott Hanton and Michelle Hoad.

- The significant increase in lab visibility post-COVID and its impact on healthcare, as well as the strategies that led to the Medical Laboratory Professionals Association of Ontario's membership surge.

- The importance of cultivating emotional intelligence, empathy, and the role of continuous learning in effective lab management.

- Understanding and addressing the challenges of staff exhaustion, disengagement, and burnout in the laboratory setting.

- Personal experiences and tips from our guests, aimed at reducing decision fatigue and promoting a supportive network among lab professionals.

This episode is packed with powerful insights and personal stories aimed at elevating lab leadership to new heights.

The Lab Manager Leadership Summit is an opportunity to share knowledge, stimulate discussions, and offer guidance to budding lab leaders, thereby molding the future of lab management. So, mark your calendars! Learn more about the Lab Manager Leadership Summit HERE!
Also, for more information about the Lab Manager Academy, CLICK HERE.

Also, be sure to revisit eLABorate Topics | Episode 38: Preparing for Success: A Guide to Maximizing Your Next Conference for great tips as you prepare for this Summit and your next conference!

Special Guest Bio:
Michelle Hoad is the CEO of the Medical Laboratory Professionals Association Of Ontario. The MLPAO is the largest lab association in Canada. Michelle joined the MLPAO in October 2016 and over the past 7 years has seen a 73% growth in membership. The MLPAO has positioned itself as the voice of med lab professionals in Ontario and the go-to place for government, media, and stakeholders for lab human health resource information. 

Before joining the MLPAO, Michelle consulted with several provinces to help them raise the profile of med lab professionals with the government and media. She also spent 25 years in the for-profit sector working with Fortune 500 companies. She is a Certified Association Executive, has been invited to speak at many lab industry events across the country, and has made tremendous progress with the Ontario government influencing policy and obtaining much-needed funding for lab professionals.  Through COVID she had over 250+ media appearances in Ontario and across Canada, reinforcing the message that med lab professionals are at the center of healthcare and that healthcare is more than just doctors and nurses.

Connect with Michelle Hoad:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellehoad/
Website: mlpao.org

Scott Hanton is the Editorial Director of Lab Manager. He spent 30 years as a research chemist, lab manager, and business leader at Air Products and Intertek. He earned a BS in chemistry from Michigan State University and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Scott is an active member of ACS, ASMS, and ALMA. Scott married his high school sweetheart, and they have one son. Scott is motivated by excellence, happiness, and kindness. He most enjoys helping people and solving problems. Away from work, Scott enjoys working outside, playing strategy games, and coaching youth sports.
Connect with Scott Hanton:
Email: shanton@labmanager.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-hanton/

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This episode illuminates the exciting, sometimes nerve-wracking, journey of launching a founding membership. Days 1-3 of the 5 day launch.  Our host details the five-day launch process, covering daily lives, email structure, social media posts, and overcoming the fear of a small audience. He shares his insightful and valuable strategies that led him to attract 27 founding members, even with a limited email list and Facebook audience.

Show Notes:

• Uncover the secrets of the founding member launch
• Why setting a time limit creates urgency and triggers action
• The power of Facebook Lives and using your profile instead of your business page
• The importance of follow-ups and overcoming fear of a small audience
• Strategies for warming up your audience and driving engagement
• Understand how collaboration can supercharge your membership growth

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Many association leaders don’t realize it, but being mindful of your members’ experiences is the secret to growing your community. This week, I’m sharing five key ways that your association can curate a unique, memorable membership experience that will make your organization stand out in the marketplace, attracting members that will continually reinvest in all you have to offer.

Visit us at sarahsladek.com

As an association leader, member satisfaction is one of your top priorities. Oftentimes, new ideas can clash with established traditions, leaving your membership base at odds with one another. In this week’s episode, I am sharing how you can solve disparities between your more seasoned members and NextGen populations by creating a solid succession plan and looking at membership data trends. The ball is in your court: are you ready to ace the game of membership?

Visit us at sarahsladek.com

As an association leader, you’ve likely discovered that the road to success will have some bumps along the way. Your final destination? Growing your membership community and providing a robust experience for your members! In this week’s episode, I am discussing the three roadblocks that organizations commonly encounter that can take you down a path toward disengagement and membership decline. I am also going to share how you can navigate past these barriers with caution to create a powerful and lasting legacy for your association’s future. 

Visit us at sarahsladek.com

We are celebrating twenty years of business this month! Over the past two decades, I’ve discovered what makes membership organizations thrive - and struggle to survive. In this week’s episode, I discuss how you can effectively combat membership decline by cultivating a sense of community amongst your members. “Equity,” “diversity,” and “inclusion” have become buzzwords in the association world, but belonging is an important fourth that often gets overlooked. I’ve got the tips and tricks to inspire your members, leaving them feeling engaged, welcomed, and valued in your membership community. 

Visit us at sarahsladek.com

Negativity can drain the energy from almost any environment, and your association is no exception! As a leader, the attitude you model is reflected in your organization. In this week’s episode, we discuss the role positivity plays in making your association more attractive to prospective members. If it’s time to build momentum within your organization, I’ve got the tools to get you started. 

Visit us at sarahsladek.com

Is your association sharing the latest buzz with your members? Just like every bee has a role in the hive, you and your members play an important part in your association's overall operations, which includes sharing all of the incredible achievements taking place! Oftentimes, associations choose to help their communities behind the scenes, avoiding “unnecessary” recognition or attention. It’s time to abandon this mindset and take on a new approach that will garner buzz and momentum while attracting new members to your hive. 

Visit us at sarahsladek.com

What drives people to join organizations? You may think it’s the perks you offer or the networking and programming opportunities you provide, but don’t be fooled by those illusions! Rather, members will join your organization because they genuinely believe you’ve got the magic to solve their problems. To be effective in today’s rapidly changing world, you need to understand the way to your member’s hearts. This week’s episode of the Membership IQ explores the relationship between workforce and membership decline and how you can remedy it - no magic tricks necessary!

Visit us at sarahsladek.com

There exists a widespread misconception that “young people don’t join” membership organizations. Perhaps your association has struggled with a similar mindset. I’m here to debunk this “membership myth” and share with you the ways in which you can recruit (and retain!) young members. Tune in to this week’s episode of the Membership IQ, as we discuss how the cycle of engagement has evolved for young people over the last century and its lasting impact on membership organizations. I provide three key strategies that will transform how you attract and engage NextGen members, making that “membership myth” a thing of the past.  

Visit us at sarahsladek.com

We’ve all been there - trying to be everything to everyone. Organizations find themselves in this same position by trying to accommodate too broad of an audience. In this week’s episode, we explore your “target market,” a concept rooted in quality rather than quantity. You will learn how to add value to your organization and attract new members that will continue to steer your association towards a successful future!

Visit us at sarahsladek.com

About This Episode

Let's learn about how your association can diversify your revenue with non-dues revenue ideas. Our guest, Edward Byers, shares his expertise on non-dues revenue and how associations can diversify their revenue. Let's talk about why non-dues revenue is so important to associations and some key non-dues revenue areas.

About Our Guest

Edward Byers is the Director, Membership & Business Development at CSAE Canadian Society of Association Executives. Edward is an expert in business development and member engagement for generating revenue for associations through membership drives.

Full List of Questions We Asked Edward

Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

What partnerships are important to help create these revenue streams?

Can you share an experience when you helped an association make non-dues revenue?

Typical associations are tight on staff and money, are there any easier revenue streams you would recommend they get off the ground?

What are the different options for non-dues revenue.If I am an association leader, where do I start to create non dues revenue? 

Do you have any examples of other non-dues revenues?

What types of partnership should we be exploring?

Since associations are mostly member based and the main focus should be the members, how much time should we allocate for alternate revenue streams?

Partnership is a big source of non dues revenue for associations, how would you ensure that all parties are getting value from the partnership and revenue streams?

Since we build membership sites for associations, what tools associations need on their membership site to be set up for non dues revenue?

Can you share some challenges you have had setting up non dues revenue?

Audience Questions

How can you track the progress, success or failure of a non dues revenue stream?

How do you structure the internal team to execute on sponsorships? Roles and responsibilities?

How to provide more value to sponsors and partners now that everything is virtual and it’s hard to get attendees and members to engage with sponsors?

What are some things to balance corporate partnership with advertising-sensitive members?

We are a provincial association. Do you have any best practices for associations to partner with sister provincial associations to develop programming that benefit the entire industry? Or do you recommend not to do it?

Should members care if their partnership dollars help support the mission of the association? Do members benefit from those sponsorship dollars?

Closing Questions

What is your biggest takeaway for our audience?

Can you share a personal habit that has contributed the most to your success?

How can people get in touch if they have any questions?

Special acknowledgement to our guests for providing powerful insights into membership management. 

Follow our podcast for more free educational content.

Visit memberlounge.app to learn more about us.

Contact anika@grype.ca for questions or support.

About This Episode

Let's talk about how to take charge of your association's membership website redesign project! It starts with understanding that you — the client — are just as much responsible for a successful outcome as your service provider (your developers). Learn where everyone's responsibilities begin and end, how to pick the right developer, and how to actually launch as close to on time and on budget as possible!

About Our Guest

Natasha Golinsky is the founder and lead project manager at On Purpose Projects. Natasha is an expert at website development project management, project scoping, managing expectations and preventing project-scope creep that delays and adds costs to your membership site project.

Full List of Questions We Asked Natasha

Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Can you share some common mistakes organizations make in planning their website projects?

Very often prospective clients come to us with a project plan that is not what they need to accomplish what they want. What would be your approach to planning a website project?

Can you share your thoughts about RFPs, and how they impact a project versus a workshop or formal project scoping process?

As much as we want our clients to do a thorough job understanding and scoping their project, most clients don’t have the technical experience or marketing background to do this on their own. When clients are not highly technical, how would you divide the responsibility between you and the client?

You mentioned you work on high-ticket projects with large organizations. With organizations like this, you work with multiple stakeholders and point people. What are some key project roles that the client should take on?

How does the QA process fit into the scope and cost of the project?

In order to make a project successful, we have to put some key boundaries in place. What are some key boundaries you set?

We test and QA and try to imagine every foreseeable outcome and risk, but there are always things that come up after launch that you didn’t predict. How do you handle these QA blindspots?

What if a website is already built and just needs some fixes to improve it. How would the project scoping work?

How would you scope a membership site differently than a regular website?

Audience Questions

How can you get buy-in from leadership that thinks its members don't need an engaging website to join. 

What are some important questions I should ask the developers?

How important is domain knowledge (industry-specific experience)? Eg. working on a restaurant website vs a medical website. Is working with an agency with membership experience important for member-based organizations?

What are the key things to consider when creating a tender document for a membership organization website? What are the pitfalls and the key pointers to achieving a successful outcome?

Closing Questions

What is your biggest takeaway for our audience?

Can you share a personal habit that has contributed the most to your success?

Special acknowledgement to our guests for providing powerful insights into membership management. 

Follow our podcast for more free educational content.

Visit memberlounge.app to learn more about us.

Contact anika@grype.ca for questions or support.

In this episode, we explore the notion of finding your niche - and how it can positively impact your membership growth potential. Most of us can relate to the practice of trying to tackle too many things at once - and therefore accomplishing nothing at all! If your organization is trying to be everything to everyone, it's hard to focus on that ONE thing you do better than everyone else. We live in a time when meaningful interactions and experiences matter - and people are joining organizations that provide those very services. Let’s count your organization among those who not only find their niche but excel at it! 

Visit us at savetheassociations.com 

About this Episode

In this episode, we talk about digital sustainability and how sustainable web design can help to improve the user experience​. We will explore how the pursuit of sustainable web projects can produce more functional websites and help associations to drive traffic to their website. 

About our Guest

Tom Greenwood is an author, web designer and activist devoting his time to the field of sustainable web design. His work demonstrates that making eco-friendly choices does not have to be a sacrifice; environmental choices can impact our membership and association's growth for the better!

Full List of Questions We Asked Tom

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work?

What is sustainable web design?

What are some of the advantages of thinking about sustainable web design?

How popular should a website be to be really serious about this?

Can you walk us through your process: how would you build sustainability into the process?

How would you change the user experience on a website to make it sustainable?

Sustainable web design is a mutual responsibility of both the client and the developers. What can the developers do to impress upon the client that sustainable web design should be a priority?

What is the role of the client?

Should we really cut down the content on our sites and really focus in on a few things that really matter?

We are a big proponent of reducing waste. What practices can designers and developers change about our work to be more sustainable?

We build membership sites where many members visit the same pages. Is there better value to optimize the sustainability of pages that are used more than others?

We are working on a lot of websites where we are trying to include accessibility. Is there a way to include accessibility and sustainability principals hand-in-hand in the design?

For membership websites, are there things they can do to reduce their carbon footprint?

For the day to day activities, what are sustainable choices associations can make?

You mentioned a website that can help people assess the sustainability of their website. Tell us more about this?

Audience Questions

What are some examples of web design choices that people make that they don't realize have a terrible ecological impact?

How can we communicate our sustainable web choices without being pretentious or gimmicky?

Does eco-friendly also mean longterm sustainability of the internet?

Closing Remarks

What is your biggest takeaway for our audience?

Can you share a personal habit that has contributed the most to your success?

Special acknowledgement to our guests for providing powerful insights into membership management. 

Follow our podcast for more free educational content.

Visit memberlounge.app to learn more about us.

Contact anika@grype.ca for questions or support.

We kick off the first season of The Membership IQ podcast by getting into the Membership is Life mindset! In this episode, I give some backstory behind my passion for multigeneration membership practices. I began to see the challenges associations face due to an apathy towards membership and the belief that members will always continue to grow. Let’s face it, as membership professionals, we don't have a lot of guidance on what it takes to engage and retain the next generation of members. In this podcast, I give you actionable strategies based on my experiences over the last decade to get into the Membership is Life mindset.   

In the last thirty years, "the business of membership" has shifted dramatically. Associations of yesteryear are unrecognizable compared to the ones we have today, and people are no longer joining simply because it’s “the right thing to do”. With membership rates on the decline around the globe, we can no longer ignore how times have changed. Associations are under constant pressure to deliver ROI for their members in new and innovative ways -- yet, many associations are not set up to keep up with this pace of change.

In this episode, we'll tackle how clinging to traditional hierarchies has been holding associations back from achieving membership growth. As our workforce and potential members are getting younger, their vision of "value" is changing, and so are the ways they want it delivered. Yet, there are some nuanced similarities to keep in mind from generations past.

About This Episode

In this episode, we speak to Brock Murray about how SEO works to generate leads for your association to increase your membership numbers. He discussed all the best practices in creating content with SEO in mind and he also shared with us the tools he recommends for tracking your traffic. He also delved into Google Analytics and how we can maximize this tool in our SEO campaigns. 

About Our Guest

We are privileged to have, seoplus+ co-founder and COO, Brock Murray as our guest speaker for this episode. Brock is an SEO (search engine optimization) giant with experience in local, national and international SEO. He knows all things content marketing strategy and Google Analytics.

Full List of Questions from the Podcast

Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

Can you tell us in brief why associations should invest in SEO?

For an association, what areas of SEO should they focus on?

You mentioned that content should be in depth; what defines depth in the SEO world?

How long should your blogs be?

Any advice on identifying keywords?

When we are working on SEO, how far do you recommend an association keep the SEO work in-house before bringing in a consultant?

SEO algorithms are always changing—you catch up with the current standards and then they change. How can we keep up and stay relevant?

Is it possible to create evergreen content (pillar content or topic clusters) that will always be relevant and desirable to search engines?

How would you come up with pillar content?

Idea of creating content around pain points of your membership.

Will Google penalize us for sharing the same blog on different platforms?

For the average association, what key performance metrics should they pay attention to for SEO?

If an association’s website is on the third page in Google search results, what does the association need to do to get to the first page in Google search results?

Can you recommend any SEO monitoring tools, for example with competitive intelligence?

Say that an association ranks on the top page of Google search results, how can an association improve the user experience on their site once they click?

Leveraging your high Google Search ranking to establish yourself as an authority in your field.

Associations have different types of content on their sites (eg. blogs, webinars, etc); is there a way to inter-connect the content for better SEO results?

How much content should an association have on its site?

How often should an association publish new content?

Is there a way to MISSING INFO to get better results?

The difference between investing in SEO and paid ads?

Does having webpages that are low traffic hurt your SEO?

Here is the list of questions we asked Brock, for your reference:

What is your advice to associations who haven’t started their digital marketing for their association: where should we start?

What is one potential SEO trend that is not popular now that you see gaining traction in 2022?

What are your top tools for SEO analytics?

What are the most important Google Analytics metrics to watch?

How do you think Core Web Vitals will start affecting websites in search?

For membership sites where most of the quality content is hidden behind the member login, SEO cannot see these pages. How can we balance keeping content private to members but benefit from SEO from those pages.

Sharing teaser content and using pay walls for SEO search engines can see the content but users cannot.

Do you have any key takeaway for our audience?

Can you share a personal habit that contributed to your success?

Can you share a digital tool or strategy that helps you with your work?

Special acknowledgement to our guests for providing powerful insights into membership management. 

Follow our podcast for more free educational content.

Visit memberlounge.app to learn more about us.

Contact anika@grype.ca for questions or support.

This week's guest is General Manager of CrossFit 2222 in Austin, TX, Keoni Subiono. Born and raised in Hawaii, Keoni founded and built CrossFit East O’ahu into an insanely successful gym - both financially and community-wise with his members. He's taken that business savvy mixed with a heart for community to help build CrossFit 2222…throughout a global pandemic.  How do you keep a community and client-base growing and connected when human connection is a no-go? You get creative. You get scrappy. Listen in as this strategy and tactics can be applied across industries.

The Start

• Personal trainer, top producer in Southern California for Bally Total Fitness
• Moved back to Hawaii for the birth of their first son
• Found CrossFit when writing a story for the Honolulu Star Bulletin
• Affiliated the gym he founded with CrossFit, became CrossFit East O’ahu and then opened the second affiliate CrossFit West O’ahu
• Created the biggest CrossFit membership in the state of Hawaii

The Shift

• Switched his gym to CrossFit in 2008 when the economy crashed
• Personal training came back in 2014, shifted his gym to be a hybrid model
• Sold CrossFit East O’ahu and CrossFit West O’ahu in 2018 and moved to Texas
• Oldest son is ranked #1 in the 14-15 teen division in the world for the CrossFit Games

The Strategy

• Took over CrossFit 2222 in 2019, built up membership pre-COVID
• Ran Zoom classes so engaging that home fitness people keep connecting
• Created the 'Apocalypse Games' during shutdown

The Action

• Become a master of building community
• Continuously innovate, keeping members moving
• Make mistakes, learn, keep building, repeat.

The Mindset

• Deliberate and concise on where to place energy
• 4AM wake-up time, time-block the day
• Dedicate certain days for certain business objectives
• Prioritize family and core values
• Goals and Vision 
  • Creating and rolling out a profitable guide to mastering the operations of a micro gym 
  • Focusing on 12-week 'Transform' program, continue to package and sell to other gyms 

The Wrap-Up

If you could listen to one music artist for the rest of your life, who would it be? Pearl Jam

Where can people find you online?

• CrossFit 2222 Website