Not All Members Are the Same; Lessons From Texas Senator Wendy Davis

Members engage with your organization in different ways. That’s why it’s important to consider their engagement type.

That, and more, in today’s Lunchtime Links:

Engaging ways: Just because a member doesn’t go to meetings doesn’t mean he or she isn’t engaging with your organization. Tom Morrison, CEO of the Metal Treating Institute, identifies three member segments  (opens in a new tab), based on engagement style: informational, transactional, and emotional. Consider these segments when approaching your members. “Having members broken out by engagement segment will give us a marketing advantage because now we can thank and reward those who are really engaged and encourage those who are not,” Morrison writes on his blog.

The eleventh hour: Texas Sen. Wendy Davis had one goal on Tuesday: filibuster SB 5, a bill in the state senate that would significantly restrict abortions. Wearing a pair of pink tennis shoes, Davis stood and spoke for 11 straight hours with no breaks. Her filibuster was interrupted when Republican challengers argued that she had gone off topic. But a raucous crowd kept lawmakers from casting their votes until time expired, essentially tabling the bill. Writing for Fast Company, Miles Kohrman highlights a few leadership lessons learned from the senator’s fight  (opens in a new tab). Among them: Don’t give in. “In March 2012, a bag stuffed with six Molotov cocktails was left outside Davis’ office in [Fort] Worth. The resulting fire caused damage to her office, but was extinguished by several alert staffers,” Kohrman reports. In the wake of the incident, Davis told the Dallas Observer  (opens in a new tab), “We have an open door and we will continue to have an open door. And I’ll continue to talk about the things I’ve been talking about. I don’t intend to change my public positions on those issues or to be quiet going forward.”

Data crunch: Big data is all the rage. But are organizations effectively using the information they collect? A report from McKinsey Global Institute  (opens in a new tab) estimates that the U.S. economy needs an additional 1.5 million data-savvy managers to make sense of the data companies collect daily. “Too many managers are, with the help of their analyst colleagues, simply compiling vast databases of information that never see the light of day, or that only get disseminated in auto-generated business intelligence reports,” Thomas H. Davenport, research fellow at the MIT Center for Digital Business, writes on HBR.com  (opens in a new tab). “As a manager, it’s not your job to crunch the numbers…it is your job to communicate them. Never make the mistake of assuming that the results will speak for themselves.” Davenport writes more about these issues with coauthor Jinho Kim in the book Keeping Up With the Quants. What does your association do to make good use of the data it collects?

What are you reading today? Let us know in the comment section below.

(photo by Incase/Flickr)