Xperience 2017 is filled with opportunities to grow your skills in leadership, marketing, membership, technology and more. Here are the tracks and sessions currently available. To view the schedule-at-a-glance, please continue scrolling.
Track Descriptions
Xecutive Next
Designed for C-level suite executives, including CEOs, EDs, CFOs, CIOs and CLOs, ready to take the next step for their organization. These cutting-edge tracks provide relevant topics and information that empowers you to put into action upon returning to the office. Topics will include: creative and agile leadership, how to future proof your association, developing a data-driven association, and how to keep your data secure. You will hear from other leaders on lessons learned and how they overcame them.
Business Xcellence + Innovation
Leadership, culture, service, brand and innovation. Every successful business excels at harnessing these core pillars, but they can also work wonders for your association. Throughout these sessions, you will master the five pillars of successful business practices as specifically applied to associations and their unique needs. Learn new trends in staff training, the best strategy to get buy-in from your board, new revenue models, and more. Together, these lessons will forge an enduring bond between inspired leaders, motivated staff, satisfied members to grow your organization.
Marketing + Membership
Are your recruitment and retention numbers down?Are you struggling to find new revenue sources that don't burden your members? Do members no longer see value in membership? Then you do not want to miss these sessions on Marketing + Membership Strategies! We will explore innovative strategies that disrupt the membership model, provide new ideas on membership value propositions, and give your organization a new competitive edge that drive your revenue goals forward.
Building YM Tech for Success
The way your members connect, learn, purchase and share is changing at a rapid pace. They expect instant value and personalization across every device. Is your digital brand ready? Join us for key YM training workshops and roadmap sessions that will help you take your YM AMS, LMS and career center into the next generation of member engagement. It's out with the old and in with the new as our technology experts help you build your YM tech for success.
Flashpoint Sessions
During these fast-paced, fun-filled 30-minute sessions, you will uncover how to generate millions of members in a flash with advice from peers, test out the latest tech gadgets and software, and get new, rapid-fire inspiration on your next marketing campaign.
Click the course topic to view the full description. Check back often as descriptions are being added daily.
Sunday, April 23
Registration + Information Desk Open
Opening Reception
Welcome to Orlando, Florida! Join us for our opening reception and enjoy delicious dishes and drinks pool side.
Monday, April 24
Registration + Information Desk Open
Breakfast
Welcome to Xperience 2017 with JP Guilbault, President + CEO of YourMembership
Tamer Ali, SVP Software Solutions at YourMembership
Representative, Scrum Alliance
Agile methods and creative design have taken the business world by storm. But, according to industry surveys during the past decade, the top impediment to further agility in organizations is lack of leadership awareness, understanding and behavioral alignment with Agile values. Associations are in the same boat and should embrace using Agile principles and tools to innovate, increase speed of execution and achieve greater success. In this session, gain a clear definition of agility, which can easily differentiate Agile from non-Agile practices. Make better process decisions, preserving the most fundamental parts of agility, while experimenting with others. Lead teams and your association to adapt more rapidly and effectively to changing reality.
Tina Wehmeir, CAE, CMP, Chief Executive Officer at AMC Institute
Erin Carter, Associate Executive Director at AMC Institute
Do you have “Woo IQ”?
Interpersonal influence and relationship-based persuasion skills are among the strongest predictors of positive performance ratings of employees, often outstripping both intelligence and personality. Research has shown that people with stronger social intelligence command higher fees and salaries than equally talented but less socially adept colleagues.
You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.
This highly practical workshop shows you how to use relationship-based persuasion—rather than authority or coercion—to create alignment, build win-win partnerships and get to YES!
Source: The Art of Woo + Wharton University Pennsylvania
Identifying your set of unique assets
Leveraging those assets and creating win-win opportunities
Tara Pawlak, Director of Customer Marketing at YourMembership
Your association members got mail! But that doesn’t mean they are going to open it. So how can you be sure your members will? If you’re like most associations, with just the click of a button, email marketing is one of the most powerful communication channels you have to connect with your members. While there is no magic formula for ensuring your emails get opened, there are a few best practices to increase your chances. During this strategic and insightful session jointly presented with Informz, learn about the latest association industry trends and tactics used in email marketing through real-world case studies. Get a clear understanding about your email data and how to use it to strengthen your marketing plan. And discover the tried-and-true framework for creating marketing automation that delivers genuine results.
Join us for this session and:
Hear the latest industry trends and tactics with association case studies
Understand email data to leverage in your organization’s marketing plan
Learn the framework for creating marketing automation that delivers results
Creating an authentic, home-grown online community is not easy. A strong community is a complex ecosystem revolving around a particular cause or interest. The most high-functioning communities seem to grow naturally, but actually flourish because of engaged community managers. It is great to hear about how to run a community, but this fun session gives you tangible take-home advice and will help you plan for creating and growing a community that fosters member loyalty and helps your further your association’s goals with little effort.
When an event ends, people (hopefully!) leave feeling inspired to take action. But, over time, that inspiration might lose its luster. With video, though, you can extend the memories and consistently remind people why they attended, what they learned, and, more importantly, what they intended to bring back to their daily lives, holding them accountable. During this session, we share recommendations and tips for producing successful videos for learning. Participants will come away with clear format recommendations, such as length and style suggestions, while also avoiding common mistakes. It includes an introduction to the JetPack video engine from YM.
Scott Wiley, CAE
President & CEO, The Ohio Society of CPAs
There’s more pressure than ever on boards to live up to stakeholder expectations. You might even have a book or two on good leadership and governance on your shelf. Yet, many of you still ask: “We know what we are supposed to look like, but how do we get there?” This session provides some answers. The first step is to examine how associations are advancing with governance models dating back to the industrial and pre-World War eras. Then, understand what elements of governance work and their challenges. Finally, learn how to initiate the next stage of Association Leadership by defining the current state of governance leadership models and key issues for future phases of rigorous governance research.
Josh Hirsch, M.S.
Marketing and Membership Director, NonProfits First
Participants will learn key strategies to integrate before, during and after events to maximize communication potential, build buzz, raise funds and steward donors. Participants will learn how to choose which social media tools are best for event strategy, learn specific steps for implementation via case studies and how to review metrics to determine future strategy. Finally, small group work will allow attendees to develop strategies on the spot for their own events.
Many things compete for your members’ attention online. They have a lot of choices when they are in front of their screens or choosing what activities they participate in and which ones they keep peripheral. Using member data for more than just renewals and mailings and more to personalize your association member experience will wow your members right away. You can also use it to keep them engaged throughout their time as a member. During this session, you will learn how to put together quick reports to target market your members. We will explore all of the macros at your disposal to become a pro at personalizing your message in no time.
Engaged members are one of your association’s most valuable assets. You also know that engagement is essential for member retention, and engaged members help your association to grow. Online learning is a powerful tool that can help boost member engagement from that critical first day of signup. During this session, discover simple, but effective, ways to ensure your online educational programs are engaging your members all year round. We share successful techniques about using YM’s tools to assemble and deploy cost-effective, yet professional, learning content, as well as how to use testing, assessments and documents (much of your existing IP) to build compelling education.
Having a plan is a must. How will you know if you've arrived if you don't have a destination in mind? Organizations that invest the time to craft their vision and map the plan, thrive and grow. Organizations that do this regularly, excel. Once the plan is developed, it must be used. How will you get to your destination if you don't use a map? Organizations that incorporate the use of their plan into their regular operating practices outperform those that don't at a rate of 2-to-1.
Erin Fuller, President, Association Management & Consulting- MCI USA (formerly Coulter Companies)
Greg Schultz, Executive Vice President, Kellen
Due to both demographic trends and the rapidly changing nature of work, associations can be serving up to five generations via program, communication and/or event strategy. At the same time, we work with organizations where culture, structure and volunteer expectations were set decades prior. Come to develop a baseline understanding of some of the external influences that impact the value each generation places on their association engagement, and stay to develop prototype models that help further the association’s mission using newer thinking around system design, value and community building.
Amanda Kaiser, MBA
Chief Path Finder, Kaiser Insights LLC
Does your data tell you that your new members renew at a lower rate than other members? Do you wonder how you can engage each member even more? Have your retention metrics plateaued even though you are improving your renewal process? Members think far differently about joining, engaging and renewing than we do. In conversations with more than 313 members, I've learned that our membership process is not a year-long cycle in their minds. Instead, the decision to renew is highly influenced by their experience when they first join. Learn how associations, small to large, are successfully engaging all members by focusing far more on their new members. They focus on providing their new members not just the value they need, but on creating exceptional experiences, too.
In an ever-increasing and fast-paced mobile world, your association content must be responsive in order to better serve your members. But adjusting your content to be responsive doesn’t have to hurt. There are many tips and tricks to learn to make mobile content creation easy, transforming what used to be lengthy pages of content into tidy nuggets packed with relevant informational gold. Help clean up each member’s desktop site and simplify navigation for them to get done what they came to do. Mobile is here, and now you will be ready!
With the increasing demand to roll out online learning courses, associations find themselves in a dilemma whether to grab courses off the shelf or develop the learning content from scratch. However, when the course content is less specific and more generic, off-the-shelf courses are an easy and cost-effective way to go. During this session, learn who are the top authoritative online learning course providers and the titles they offer through YM. Then, we help you develop a game plan about how to supplement your library with off-the-shelf courses that are already available to you, with no upfront costs or contracts.
Break
Interview with Make-A-Wish® President and CEO David Williams
Join us for an energizing discussion with Make-A-Wish® President and CEO David Williams, where he will reveal insights into:
Leading board & chapter governance
Establishing a mission-based strategy and building volunteerism
Driving brand awareness & public relations
During this café-style general session, Emmy-nominated news anchor Stacie Schaible interviews Mr. Williams on his journey of becoming CEO of the world’s largest wish-granting organization and how creating change through cause-based organizations has fueled passion in the employees and volunteers at Make-A-Wish. Attendees can participate in a live Q&A with David, then break for a Networking Hour.
Networking Event: Mingle & enjoy drinks with our wonderful sponsors
James McQuiggan, President of ISSA Florida Chapter
Product & Solution Security Officer, Siemens Wind Service
By 2020, there will be a 1-million person shortage in the area of cybersecurity. How do you get more people to work for you in cybersecurity and protect your company? One way is to educate people within the various departments and help be the “Eyes & Ears” for your IT or Information Security teams. Through a variety of techniques and education, you can help spread the message of security awareness and not only help those employees, but you can leverage them to help educate and support the business.
Learn how to make your association job board more effective for your members. See how better job ads and career pages can get qualified applicants. Learn how to think like a job candidate!
Seventy-one percent of marketers say that video conversion rates consistently outperform any other marketing content. However there are still a large number of associations not empowering their marketing teams with content captured from their events! How can this be? Join this session to learn: why event videos are critical to your marketing and membership strategy; effective ways to create and share post-conference videos with your audience; and how other associations are using video successfully and what you can learn from their results.
Associations are expected to make more data-driven decisions to better attract, engage and retain their members. Yet, it is not easy to do when you have so much data and a lot of different ways to slice, dice and digest it. In addition, not all reports are created equal. Depending on the kind of data you are seeking, the standard reports often only scratch the surface when it comes to identifying trends and looking for ways to improve or streamline processes.We will demystify the world of custom reporting and show you how to develop useful custom reports that will drive good--even great--business decisions within your organization.
Online educational programs which include video coursework offer compelling benefits; research indicates that using video more deeply inspires and more effectively engages your association members. During this session, get hands-on knowledge of the advanced techniques using videos within YM’s JetPack video player. You will learn how to optimize the delivery of video by setting the proper rendering quality for all devices and connections, as well as by choosing the appropriate configuration within JetPack for your audience and requirements. In addition, discover the effective use of completion settings and how to embed assessments within video for an enhanced learning experience.
Peter Janzow
Senior Director Business and Market Development, Open Badges Lead at Pearson VUE
During the past few years, many organizations have introduced recognition and certification programs using digital badges, but too often the results produced by these programs have disappointed. Badge earners don’t bother to claim or share their badges, and as a result issuing organizations have wasted their time and effort. But, leading organizations are willing to share their best practices. In this session, you will learn how IBM, Ingram Micro and other organizations are designing, implementing and managing their badge programs to deliver measurable business results. Understand the types of badges that drive engagement. Understand how real-time verification cements badge value for badge earners and employers, while exploring how keyword skill tagging can demonstrate job market relevance of skills and enhance employability. See how leading organizations use badge program performance data to experiment and inform the design of their programs and drive their strategy.
Guillermo Ortiz de Zarate, Director, Information Systems, National Council of Architectural Registration Boards
Elizabeth Engel, CEO & Chief Strategist, Spark Consulting LLC
There’s no bigger waste than investing resources working on the wrong thing. Lean startup methodology favors rapid experimentation over elaborate planning and relies on customer feedback over intuition. It encourages iterative design and has taken the business world by storm as a way of ensuring that you’re investing in the right thing. Using concrete examples of how associations are using lean startup to innovate, learn to apply this technique in your own organization to eliminate waste, validate your learning, and innovate faster and more successfully.
Shawn Casemore
Founder and President at Casemore and Co. Inc.
Every member interacts with an organization or association through multiple channels. It is through these interactions that members form their impression of whether the association or organization will contribute value and the various ways within which they might receive that value. . . or not. It is for this very reason that every conversation that our employees, board members and contractors have counts. It's time to shift our thinking from time bound and quantitative methods to interact with members, and help our employees and other associates understand how they personally can create higher levels of member engagement and retention.
Like most association industry events--large conferences or small meetings, attendees have just a few days to gain access to top experts, rub shoulders with hundreds or even thousands of like-minded professionals, and fill their mobile phones with large amounts of new contacts and notes for growing their business or career. Then, with tickets, various attendee types and promo codes, one of the greatest mistakes you can make when providing an event module is waiting until the event is over to try and figure out if your module setup was successful or not. Instead, prior to launch, you should take the time to consider what success will look like for your module. During this session, we will share the best practices for your events module and get your organization on the right path to success.
For most professions in business, keeping up to date with the latest developments and retraining your association members to the newest technologies is a matter of staying relevant. Yet, for medical professionals, it is much more than that. It could be a matter of life and death. During this session, we will review key professional education case studies in both the healthcare and business fields. We will evaluate the challenges, discover how solutions were developed, and embrace what was learned along the way. Come away with key guidance on the recommendations to take home and the issues to avoid in an implementation where both stakes and expectations are high.
Vincent Phipps, M.A., CSP
Owner, Communication VIP Training and Coaching
Instead of treating others the way you want to be treated; treat others the way they want to be treated. Based on continual studies dating back over 2,000 years, this innovative approach to leadership training combines historical data with today’s ever-changing professional culture. The technique is called L.E.A.D. Each letter represents one of the four leadership communication styles: Laid back and Low Key; Energetic and Emotional; Accurate and Analytical; and Direct and Dominant. Everyone is definitely one of these four styles. Approximately 80% of us are at least two! This topic is less about being put in a box and labeled as a universal never-changing style. This topic addresses fundamental approaches to adapt to the strengths, weaknesses and motivational factors of all four styles. When you know how to avoid the words and actions triggering defensiveness, you can modify the approach to apply behaviors that will build rapport and make all four styles adore you! Increase leadership efficiency by reducing headaches caused by miscommunications.
Tristan Jordan
SVP Revenue Solutions at YourMembership
With the proper strategy in place, your association’s career center should be among the most trafficked sections of your website. Attend this session and learn how to maximize this traffic, convert the non-members who visit into paying members, and ensure that you are the first place members turn - or even the trigger - for positive career transitions.
This session includes a detailed look at:
Driving Traffic to the Career Center
Promoting more than Jobs on the Career Center to Drive New-Member Acquisition
Use of Career Center Data to Build Member Prospect Lists
No matter how careful your association staff is, you cannot keep your data perfect. But, it is necessary for associations to keep an updated database, both for ensuring efficient contact with their members and providing opportunities to grow the organization. Ultimately, you must create a “single member view,” meaning that there is only one record for each member that contains all of that member’s relevant data. The process of data cleansing or data scrubbing offers many benefits to your association by keeping your data as accurate as possible and delivering that single view. Our Data Configuration Specialist will share quick and easy tips and tricks to help you clean up your member data, which could even increase member outreach by as much as 20%.
LinkedIn, Khan Academy, Coursera, edX, and the list goes on. These are online learning destinations that often times offer free professional education for your association members. But, do these courses share strategic learning and training resources relevant to your niche, and do they provide them in a highly active and collaborative community specific to your learners? Essentially, you need to decide how your association handles these other ample and available resources. Do you fight against them, or do you join the fray? During this session, uncover key tactics gleaned from compelling and successful case studies, and hear it straight from the association leaders.
Gone are the days when the ‘boss’ would make all the decisions and rules and workers would quietly do what they were told. In this session, Donna Mac will introduce you to a system that supports leaders who need to empower their teams to communicate effectively no matter what generation they’re engaging. Members will be provided with skills to help them communicate, collaborate, retain their best talent and accomplish their goals in less time, with less stress.
Lapsed members are too valuable to just let them go "Slytherin" away. So often our focus is on recruiting new members that we don't understand why current members leave or know how to get them to come back! Accio members! Having an effective strategy for winning back lapsed members is crucial for building a healthy membership and long-term organizational success. In this session, we will discuss the importance of focusing on lapsed members and walk through the strategic approach that brought 800 members back to AARC, resulting in membership dues of more than $64,000 in just 45 days. Learn why “we miss you” campaigns fail and what you can do differently to win back your lapsed members.
As a user of association management software, your association can continue to find efficiencies within YM’s system and your processes to breakdown silos and centralize operations, providing better visibility into your organization. Your productivity improves as your member data is integrated across all systems. The quality of your membership management increases by getting a clearer view into member engagement and overall membership lifecycle. Our AMS experts will share what efficiencies you can leverage to make your daily tasks easier, save you time and money, and strengthen member relationships.
About YourMembership
YourMembership, established in 1998, empowers associations, organizations, nonprofits and other companies worldwide to deliver more value to their users, drive non-dues revenue through innovative career centers and buyer’s guides, increase their relevance using ground-breaking engagement tools, and enhance overall operational efficiencies. YourMembership's cloud-based membership management solution enables associations to effectively brand their organizations, engage their customer bases, and streamline their administrative processes. As the world’s largest provider of membership and company management software, YourMembership provides comprehensive membership solutions to more than 5,000 customers in 32 countries. For more information, visit YourMembership.com.
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