The best member benefit
Association & Network Forums
Customized peer groups keep people engaged in a meaningful way.
Why Associations Choose a Forum Program
Peer groups are an excellent member benefit. Your members can get content anywhere. What they cannot get anywhere is a small group of peers with similar roles, from different firms, and a structured conversation method that reliably turns a friendly group into a focused one. Forums explore strategic and tactical issues, as well as deep professional topics like confrontation, procrastination, and rejection at work. A forum program for your association can solve a number of challenges.
-
Want members to renew? A member who is in a forum has an ongoing reason to stay: a tightly-bonded personal board of directors right inside your association.
-
Want members to engage with you between events? Forums meet year round, so the relationship with your organization stays relevant all year.
-
Want a benefit that is hard to copy? Any association can run a webinar. A healthy peer group with a protocol behind it is a real showcase benefit that your competitors cannot slap together at the last second.
-
Want your team to have meaningful relationships with your members? Use your forum program to weave multi-threaded relationships between members and staff.
Step one is deciding which of these we are solving. Programs can be fully facilitated by our team, or your members can be trained to run the meetings themselves.
Peer Group Participation
Fully Facilitated Forums
Our professional facilitators lead each session. They introduce topics, and lead structured discussions. Each group learns our rigorous protocol, and the facilitators blend a bit of personal sharing into the sessions so people build enough trust to be candid about professional challenges. We match your groups with a facilitator who has both the relevant background experience needed and the right personality to gain the respect of the group.
Meet the facilitators.
Peer Moderated Forums
If your members run their own meetings, our professional facilitators will launch and train the group over a series of initial meetings. Each group will select a peer moderator: a forum member who leads the meeting and is our point of contact for the group. Our moderator coach meets your moderators every month to plan good meetings and work through whatever is going on, and we follow up when something needs attention rather than waiting to be asked.
Program Design
Once we know what we are solving for, we design the groups to match. Members are grouped with people who hold a similar role at another company, and titles vary inside a group. A CEO might sit with a president, or with a VP who runs something much larger, and a board chair with board members. We help you socialize the idea with your members, draft the communications, check for conflicts between firms, build the rosters and get dates on the calendar. We have the content ready to go.
Structured Meetings
Each meeting agenda varies a bit, depending on the overall goal of the program, but they all follow a clear format with timed turns and a clear deep dive. Most meetings start with a warm-up question, move into short updates from each member, then explore a relevant topic more deeply. That deep-dive topic can be determined by the group that day, or settled in advance.
What are the risks?
-
Attendance or Membership Drifts. This happens when attendance isn't tracked or the meetings become stale. We handle both of these for you, so your members know what to expect from each other and can rely on their meeting to be valuable and interesting.
-
Competitors hold back. Members from firms that bid against each other will not present anything real if they are in forum with one another. We check for that when we build the rosters, as any good peer-group agency will do.
-
Weak experience compared to other options. More and more peer group opportunities are emerging. If the groups you offer aren't providing similar or better value, your members will know the difference.
-
Forum doesn't fix operating problems. If your renewal problems are about price or relevance, a peer group program is unlikely to fix it.
What changes when you have a peer group program?
-
Members closely identify with their peer group, and your association by proxy. They feel less alone in their role and credit your organization for building the bridge.
-
Members stay longer. Forum is a 'sticky benefit', meaning members retain their membership longer when they have genuine relationships and cadenced meetings with others in the association or network.
-
Other events are enhanced. When members are more connected with each other, they are more likely to attend conferences, networking, and fundraising events, especially when those events are structured to include peer groups in the programming.
​
When you speak with us, we’ll help you decide which forum program is right for your members, how to measure the outcomes, and who to select for the first groups.