Use Crowdsourcing to Freshen Up a Meeting

With websites like GoFundMe gaining more traction, crowdsourcing has become an increasingly popular way for organizations to bolster fundraising, advocacy, and new activities and services. The Association of Proposal Management Professionals harnessed this concept to breathe new life into its 2018 Bid & Proposal Con in San Diego.

A few years ago, APMP Executive Director Rick Harris realized that members were drifting in and out of sessions at the conference and were not as engaged as they used to be, even as the meeting moved to top-tier cities. Working with Director of Membership Peter Frank, the pair designed a project to find out what topics members actually wanted covered during sessions. APMP “wanted to make sure the content was following that excitement of where we were,” Harris says.

The process began with a combination of exit surveys, email surveys, and committee surveys in which members could share their interests. If members wanted to provide more in-depth feedback, the team would then follow up with those individuals. “It was turning it back over to the people in a way that was more than just, ‘We’re listening,’” Harris says. “It was … ‘You bring us the topics, and we’ll build it out for you.’”

The surveys revealed that members were interested in new themes and topics and that they wanted sessions to involve actionable programming, interactive activities, and panel discussions.

With this information in hand, the team sent out an email with a link to a webpage that listed the 60 topics that members had identified. From there, potential speakers could submit a 200-word proposal on up to three of them. The page also allowed potential speakers to propose wildcard topics, but the team found many of these submissions covered the same subjects and speakers that had been repeatedly featured over the years. Ultimately, the conference covered 45 topics, incorporating those that drew interest from three or more potential speakers.

It was turning it back over to the people in a way that was more than just, ‘We’re listening.’
—Rick Harris, Association of Proposal Management Professionals

Overall, the project brought in 62 new speakers. Also worth noting, Harris says, is that many of the new speakers were people who had been attending the meeting for years, but who never had the confidence to lead a session.

While APMP typically sees attendance grow 5 or 6 percent year over year, attendance increased 8 percent in 2018—something the organization says can be attributed to the crowdsourcing project serving as early advertising for the conference. In addition, the event sold out six weeks in advance, even after more space was added.

“What we learned from it is that the quest for new speakers is really the secret sauce,” Harris says. “People will give you their opinion on what they think is right and the topics that they want to hear. That actually was so easy to get and so eye-opening. What was harder was to pull people out, sell them on selling themselves, and have them be a part of a panel and speaking and talking.”

Going forward, the team hopes to continue adding new topics to the conference, ensure that two-thirds of speakers are new each year, and involve members in the planning process.

“All your members want to see you do is work on their behalf and include them, and this project had all those elements,” Harris says. “So we’re going to took at future projects and say, ‘How do we include our members in this in a more than passive way?’ We don’t want them just to buy it; we want them to help design it.”

For associations looking to involve members more, Harris suggests taking bold steps to try something new—and then continually make changes to keep it engaging and fresh.

“The value [for us] was in the change and reaching out to the people to help us guide the change,” he says.