Your Association’s Digital Mindset

Gaining tools that allow your association to be run digitally is only half the battle, it is equally important to change your association’s mindset.

We at Innovexa Solutions are big believers in the value the implementation of digital tools can have on organizations—associations in particular. We believe that when an association executive makes that crucial decision to take their association’s operations digital, they’re making a decision that will reap extraordinary reward. And yet, simply making that decision is not enough.

Deciding to go digital is simply one part of the equation for the success of your association. The other component of that equation is your association’s will to transform. That means not being passive in the face of the digital innovation your association undergoes but actively catering the running of your association around the digital changes.

The Digital Mindset

To help illustrate the importance of adapting your business to the digital changes it could face, let’s take a look at a tool that will become available to your association if it goes digital: analytics. When your association gains access to analytics, you will have data at your disposal that you didn’t previously. You’ll be able to see who visits your website, from where, for how long, etc.

All that only becomes useful information if you do something with it. In theory you can have all the data and facts and figures about what’s happening on your website, but if you don’t understand it or don’t know what it means and how to respond to it, it’s useless to you. As such, it’s vital that you ensure that you have the infrastructure in place to make such digital insight worthwhile to your association.

That also means that if your association currently doesn’t have the personnel to do that, start the education process right away and/or bring in people with a better grasp of the digital tools at your disposal. In the long term, it will be worth it.

Digital Training

We find that this holistic process for a successful digital transition is best described by an analogy involving working out. Let’s say you’ve been trying to get in shape but without access to a gym, and you’ve found that you’re lagging behind others that do. In order to rectify this, you pay for a gym membership.

Now you have access to a bunch of gym equipment. Is that it? Mission complete? Of course not. Even with the best training facilities in the world, if you do nothing with them or use them to workout improperly, you won’t see results, or worse, get injured. The same is true of the digital tools your association acquires. You will only see results with them if you put in the requisite work.

Thus, with all that taken into account, whatever digital tools you make a part of your association’s running are mechanisms to allow you to do something more easily, with greater efficiency, or at less cost, but it is still you that has to do it. No matter how great the tool, it cannot use itself for you—that part is up to you.

Key Takeaways:

• Takeaway 1: Taking your association digital is only the first step towards reaping the rewards of digitization.
• Takeaway 2: You have to change your association’s operational mindset so that it adapts to the digital capabilities it’s integrated.
• Takeaway 3: It’s analogous to going to the gym—if you don’t train there, all that equipment is useless.

To participate in the digital readiness survey we’re currently conducting, click the following link: http://bit.ly/insurvey-07