Association Inbreeding

You listen to the same old people every year, because you need $299.00?

Many times I am asked to give presentations when an organization has a meeting in Colorado. As I work through the presentation process eventually someone tells me that I have to register and pay to attend the conference.

I don’t. I also don’t present if they think their money is more important than my time.

First, you have nothing and are doing nothing that I want to hear or see. I’m not sticking around. No rubber chicken, no boring speakers telling me the history of an organization I already know or don’t care about.

Second, I charge for my time and my knowledge and I was offering to give you a speech or presentation for free. I expect a letter in return thanking me and providing me with a tax write off. (If you figure one hour for the presentation, three hours to prepare, five hours round trip and presentation, that is nine hours or more than $3000 of my time.)

Third, all you are doing is inbreeding: dragging the intelligence of the attendees downhill.

If the only people who want to talk at your conference are those who attend the conference, you are simply reinforcing possibly wrong information. You start to believe what you are saying because you have no dissenting voice. You have no choice but to believe, because it is the only thing you hear.

Your conference becomes a computer, what comes out of the conference is only as good as what goes into the conference. If what is going into your conference is the same every year, then you are simply filling time and space rather than computing.

If the only people who communicate at the conference are the same ones, I hear all yearlong, why should anyone attend?

Signs of Association Inbreeding:

· Attendance varies based the location not the speakers, fun place more attendees.

· A lot of people plan on attending every other year or every three years.

· The people who are regular attendees are also the speakers.

· No one walks out of a presentation mad, upset, concerned or thinking they might be doing something wrong the entire conference.

From a legal perspective and from about every other perspective I can think of, you need new ideas. Your attendees need to find out what you are doing right and equally if not important find out what you are doing wrong.

You need new voices, new ideas, and new people making your attendees think.

I understand the finances of non-profits and trade associations. (I serve on four boards right now.) You need money. However, if you ask for money at the expense of the value of what you provide, you will go away no matter how much you charge. You may have a couple of thousand dollars in your account from desperate people who believe they have something to say and are willing to pay for it, but your association will eventually go away.

If you were a publishing company you would be called a “vanity press.” Before print on demand, there were a few publishing companies that if you paid, they would print your crap. You can see the results at yard sales when the heirs of the deceased give away a book with every sale: “Grandpa’s book on the trains of Calvarias County free with every purchase.” Other than a copy at the historical society, friends at the model train club and the nieces and nephews for Christmas, every single copy is still in the boxes in the basement. Bad grammar, bad theories and something 17 people really don’t care about.

Book awards automatically rejected submissions from vanity presses. They were bad.

Don’t become a vanity press. Don’t believe that because someone was willing to pony up your conference fee what they have something of value to present. If Vanity presses are any indication, the worst publishing in the world was paid for. The same can be said about your conference. Who wants to hear what someone paid to say because someone would not pay them to hear it?

Don’t believe that what you hear at a conference where everyone in front of you paid the same amount of money as you has any value. If I have to pay to say something, it is because I can’t find an audience that is willing to listen to me for free or pay me to talk.

If I pay you to talk, then what I have to say has no value.

Reach out and find new people who disagree with you, who do not just take what is handed to them at face value. Provide quality speakers to answers the questions your members have. Find someone who may never become a member but who has a value to your members.

Even better, you might provide such a valuable conference that the speaker’s becomes a member.

Besides, don’t you get tired of listening to the same old people year after year after year………

What do you think? Leave a comment.

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