Ep. 3 | James Young: Rethinking Member Engagement from the Ground Up

What if the association business model is fundamentally broken — and has been for decades? In this episode of Built to Connect, Jackson sits down with Dr. James Young, founder of Product Community and two-time chief learning officer, to challenge the way associations think about revenue, member engagement, and the value they deliver to their communities.

James introduces concepts like the "forever member journey," compound value, and micro-community design as a path toward a more engaged, financially resilient model — one where members don't just consume value, but actively create it.

James's one piece of advice for every association leader: stop putting all your eggs in one basket, and start co-creating longitudinal journeys with your members instead of just serving them.

Topics covered:

• Why the association business model is broken
• Community as a differentiated value proposition
• The "forever member journey" & serving the next generation of members
• Good revenue vs. bad revenue
• Small experiments, cohorts & compound value
• Real-world models: New Century College & impact networks
• What associations should stop doing and what comes next

Transcript

James 0:02

What business model, what company, what organization in the world would bank 60% of its revenue on four days out of the year to serve 20% of its customers.

Jackson Boyar 0:15

Hmm.

James 0:16

The old model, the old phrase is benefits. The new model is how do we spark people to get engaged and involved to not only learn, but to also create learning and to create new value.

0:35

Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Build to Connect podcast. I'm your host, Jackson Boyar, co-founder and CEO of RallyBoard. Today we have Dr. James Young as our guest. James is a two-time chief learning officer at associations and the current founder of Product Community. James self describes as a subversive in the association industry, and today brings some bold and thoughtful takes on how the association business model is broken and where thoughtful network theory and community building can change that dynamic. We're delighted to have James on the episode today and hope you enjoy listening.

Jackson Boyar 1:18

So, James, welcome to the Built to Connect podcast. Thanks for being a guest. Your background is quite interesting and I'm excited for the conversation today. You started your career doing distance learning as a librarian. You've been a chief learning officer across two noteworthy associations, and now you are an entrepreneur. So a ton to share and dig into, but maybe we can start with what led you to start your own thing having worked within associations as a learning leader?

James 1:53

Thank you, Jackson. Appreciate you, inviting me and, I'm looking forward to a nice conversation. if there are through lines throughout my career, kind of, kind of like steady state interests and steady state instincts, Two words come to mind. One is learning and one is community. And I started off my career as, as a librarian. So I have a master's in what used to be called library science. It's now called information right down the road, the University of Michigan. And I was interested even then, like in my early twenties in not this is like when was going like technicolor in the nineties and I was just super curious about information, about change, about new business models, but I was mostly interested in saying how do we make this, at least from a perception perspective, kind of a traditional institution, lively, indispensable, something that can be embedded in our day-to-day life, doesn't like kind of serve as something that's off to the side. And that central question is a function of learning and community. And so that notion of how do we embed is kind of an evergreen question, and it's something that's still, keeps me going today. I just love, love that question. So, how did I become an entrepreneur? So I worked most of my career in higher ed.

Jackson Boyar 3:18

Hmm.

James 3:19

I was in libraries and I was in IT and I taught. So I did all these interesting different things. I had a really key, experience in the late nineties, early aughts in which I actually worked in a full body learning community for 10 years and I actually wrote my dissertation on faculty learning communities. So I was really just really trying to say like, what are these new models out here where we can do these really interesting work that kind of gets stuck in bureaucracy or stuck in silos? So most of my career in higher ed doing innovation work. I was recruited to come to, an association here in Ann Arbor. So I came back home with my family. And the big questions in both of the associations I worked for were around, how do we link engagement to revenue?

Jackson Boyar 4:09

Hmm.

James 4:09

So I wouldn't say, that's a great question in and of itself. But to me that's an interesting challenge in the space of associations, which as I think we both agree, it can be kind of, sleepy, kind of traditional, a little rigid, but kind of hold this timeless potential. And so flipping over to associations, I didn't wanna come to an association to, have a retirement job. I'm way too young for that. I don't think that way. I viewed it as an opportunity to say, how might we do really interesting work.

Jackson Boyar 4:42

I love that and, I, I do think you're something of a contrarian, a necessary one in my view, to the association field.

James 4:50

I am subversive.

Jackson Boyar 4:52

We'll, we'll get into that today. We'll also talk about the product community and the work you're doing today, but you're writing, I think is a good place to start. You've, you've written a lot about how the association business model is broken. I think there aren't many association CEOs who aren't thinking about member engagement and how it ties to revenue. So maybe we can start with why that premise is sort of the wrong approach to the question. And what does need to change in the association business model?

James 5:22

Two, two thoughts. Just from a, if we just kind of like move above a little bit. So, an angle, a problem state angle that I've taken with associations the past 10 years is I went from being a chief learning officer twice and then shifted over to saying, Hey, there's an interesting opportunity here to create my own company. What business model, what company, what organization in the world would bank 60% of its revenue on four days out of the year to serve 20% of its customers. So that kind of like core question. First of all, I say that all the time and I've never gotten pushback on it.

Jackson Boyar 6:00

Hmm.

James 6:00

pushback. No, no, no, no, no. So, in and of itself, what initially started in the world of associations, how association started was Jackson and Jim are gonna have a beer or a cup of coffee 'cause we're neighbors and we work together and we live in the same area and we have shared interests and shared, know, problems and things like that and we want to work through them. So in and of itself, it was always based in community. And what's happened over time, over a hundred, 150 years, depending on when you wanna count,

Jackson Boyar 6:31

IS

James 6:32

we become service organizations. And these service organizations serve undiversified revenue, and that just really, really hems us in. And the undiversified revenue largely is an annual event. Not always. Sometimes it's learning, but it's mostly an annual event and it's often, membership. So that's like almost all, I don't have the numbers in front of me, 90, 95% of associations have this revenue model./

Jackson Boyar 7:04

And I would argue for what it's worth. That the membership revenue is oftentimes a discount to the annual event, and that is why people are signing up for membership. So it is largely four days in the year for many.

James 7:18

Right. Four days out of the year, again, 60 to 70, a lot of your, revenue, and again, serving a, a slice of the market, not serving the entirety of the market. So if you pull back and you say, well, we are about what is timeless and evergreen, which is community, people coming together across boundaries to solve problems. Interesting problems. The second thing is we serve, tend to serve professions and industries. So for trade associations, we serve industries, and if we're professional societies, we serve professions. And I think we should be serving problems. And I think that if we start to think about less, about our silo discipline or our silo profession or industry and we start to think of ourselves as we have a really interesting problem or set of problems to solve over the next 10 years, five years, three years. And that and of itself becomes a in community problem. And it becomes a learning problem. And something that you and I will talk about, 'cause we've talked about it in the past, it shifts the business model away from what it is currently is, which is kind of like a passive consumption business model, more towards how do we contribute, shape, creat impact, how might we create a new model that is recognizable? That's something that's gonna look, people are gonna recognize. How do we get together as people with shared interests to solve interesting problems? And while we're doing that, how do we create value? So it's coming full circle and I think community, right now is our differentiated value proposition. But even that gives, goes through a traditional lens and it looks like a software add-on, or it looks like, oh, you gotta log in somewhere else. I think of community as a real, real robust opportunity. For us to think creatively around, okay, well what are these problems and how do we together literally roll up the sleeves and say, how do we solve them together? Identify them and solve them together? Yeah.

Jackson Boyar 9:33

Let's, let's dig into that a little bit more. How might an association productize community in that it addresses a problem for the industry or professionals it serves.

James 9:45

Well, the first kind of preparatory comment I would have around productizing community, well, one that phrasing doesn't work for the association space. So my company's called Product

Jackson Boyar 9:55

Hmm.

James 9:55

and I, I can just tell you just, know, once, once people know what we do, it, it doesn't, it's not an issue whatsoever. But those two words

Jackson Boyar 10:03

Hmm.

James 10:04

are exactly what we've been doing since the beginning. We come together in communities and we create and consume value. So we do those two things well. So the second thing I would say that's probably main point when we think about, belonging, trust, identity, and then why do I don't waste my time? I'm saying this as someone who's in his fifties, I don't need more information. I'm swimming in that. I want to get together to say who is interested in helping solve for the future?

Jackson Boyar 10:42

Hmm.

James 10:43

Associations are communities of communities. There's a misnomer out there in our space that when we invest in community, we are investing in an umbrella. We're investing in a "this is the pediatric cancer community." That's true to an extent, but when you actually study how communities work how you can get people to actually participate, that umbrella is kind of like window dressing. And then it's kind of like, how do we create really interesting communities of practice to get at that problem level? And, and, and, and associations do this as well, but that even gets lost. There's like special interest groups. There's all these kind of prevailing models in which something is, something is missing in them because there's a, a sleepiness effect, professionals are super busy and don't have the time anymore, but really what's happening is people aren't seeing the value like they may have in the past. So members and prospective members aren't seeing the value, because there's kind of new competition, new things that are kind of driving our attention and our behavior.

Jackson Boyar 11:52

Hmm.

James 11:53

I don't remember the question.

Jackson Boyar 11:55

You're, you're getting at it. I think this concept of community comes up in almost every conversation I have with an association leader. And I think it's something people believe they need to invest in. I think it's something everyone has invested in with very mixed results. I think the notion of a community platform or any sort of software that solves that problem is, is very, farfetched and misleading. It takes,

James 12:18

I'm dubious.

Jackson Boyar 12:19

Yeah. Yeah. And so if community is one of the differentiated value propositions I would agree with you we're at a time when content is plentiful. High quality content may be less, so, you have a great following on your newsletter for that reason, but it's still hard to find the high quality content, and it's so accessible through Google and LinkedIn and Reddit and LLMs. And so community becomes something that isn't so accessible and we're in a loneliness epidemic and here are the associations with these massive networks of social capital that could be deployed, but yet they aren't able to attract the interest, certainly of my generation. What do you think is missing to drive that demand?

James 13:07

I, so I wrote an article this morning a little bit about this. It was about, what I'm, I'm gonna get really deep into systems Jackson. And so I was thinking about like, what is an attention system

Jackson Boyar 13:20

Hmm.

James 13:20

how might we think differently about member acquisition, member engagement, here's the old question. The old question is how do we serve members? The new question, and it's a different question, how do we best serve the forever member journey? And so in the product community, that's kind of core to the value proposition and all the associations we work for and with to help solve their value creation problems or their community problems are really stuck in a short term mindset, a necessary short term mindset. It's really driven by like attrition rates of membership. It's driven by really short term, serving short term needs to try and

Jackson Boyar 14:10

get

James 14:10

people to persist without actually having a model to think creatively about how they would persist,

Jackson Boyar 14:16

which

James 14:16

to me is how you and I connect. So when I say associations are communities of communities, I'm talking about things like cohorts. I'm talking about things like learning pathways. And in a community of communities model, it isn't like it's got enough flexibility, it's got enough choice, and it's got, it's, it's frictionless enough so that I and you and three other people that we met can actually create a group. And it becomes something that's organic and it becomes something that is an outgrowth of a well designed association community. Well designed meaning like it's not, I like software don't get idea at all but it's not a software solution, the traditional community software solution, which I just, I just don't think they work.

Jackson Boyar 15:09

Hmm.

James 15:11

It's more how do we come together naturally, fluidly, organically with a shared interest to solve a problem. And that is a model that I think is simple enough that isn't, well, I don't have time for that because there's an intrinsic value in wanting to have agency in shaping the future. But it's hard to do if it's part of a top down traditional community structure in which you actually have to go to an event or you have to

Jackson Boyar 15:42

Yeah.

James 15:43

or you have to get, you have to kind of jump through hoops. So all of that comes around to the original themes of our conversation, which are how do we create community on a micro level and then start use it as a function of learning, and then you start create, connecting all those nodes.

Jackson Boyar 16:02

I think there's an idea in there about members driving the micro communities. I think inherent in a shared interest group model or a community platform is a bucketing by title, by topic that is coming from the association, which has visibility into member trends and industry realities, but it's not ground level. And if micro community in your mind is five people, there's a high level of specificity required to bring those individuals together, certainly, relative to what you could access on the internet. And so, I think that allowing members to find exactly what they're looking for in convenient ways is something associations struggle with. It's kind of left up to chance or you go into a very large conference hall or virtual space and hope that you bump into the right person. And there's a lot of work required, a lot of friction required to to achieve that.

James 17:00

I think it's, a solvable design question. I mean, the broader umbrella question is how do we best serve the forever member journey? So, number one, that, stretches our notion of time. We are not only we events companies that offer membership that doesn't have an enormous amount of value,

Jackson Boyar 17:22

we

James 17:22

also largely serve the mid-career professional. Like we were designed to serve the mid-career professional. We are not designed serve age 24 to 40 or 25 to 40. That market is, is very hit or miss for, for, for real reasons, structural reasons. People are starting families, they don't have a lot of money, but it's increasingly clear that it's becoming. It's just associations aren't relevant and I'm not sure that 25 to 40 when they actually persist into mid-career are actually gonna join anymore.

Jackson Boyar 17:58

Hmm.

James 17:58

I don't want to be cynical about it. It's just the opportunity, the evergreen opportunity we have and the evergreen value that we can take advantage is not like social media, doing bites, all the traditional things that you think young people want. I think they want what older people want. But the model has been created for kind of like a bygone era, the kind of mid-career model.

Jackson Boyar 18:22

Hmm.

James 18:22

And then the other part of the model is I think that there's enormous amount of people who are innovative, not all of them who are older. and so when I would create a cohort, I would want to create a cohort in which people are coming together across boundaries. Because I think that that's where sparks can fly and you start to get some really interesting ideation ideas for creating new value or even a new system for how we come together and share ideas It's not like the traditional volunteer network model in associations in which you have to kind of like wait around for a long time before you get invited to a committee.

Jackson Boyar 19:01

Hmm.

James 19:02

It's more kind of what you and I talk about, which is like, what does an innovation cohort look like and how do you tap into my innate interest, not you and me, anybody's innate interest, passion for saying, what about this? Or what about this? Or how about what have we thought about that? Without an enormous amount of high stakes. But then you create a little model and then you say, okay, well how do we replicate this? If it becomes overly programmatic, it kind of dies away.

Jackson Boyar 19:31

Let's, let's talk a little bit about, something you've described in your blog, the idea of good revenue and bad revenue for

James 19:39

Oh

Jackson Boyar 19:39

association that are facing these short term realities you alluded to. What does good revenue look like and what does bad revenue look like?

James 19:47

I would describe bad revenue as any revenue. Meaning it's, I won't call it panic revenue because, if you just look at the revenue model of, I don't have the actual numbers, but I teach this workshop called, how to Design a Product Portfolio. And I'd say three to 400 people have attended this. And we do this very simple model, the Growth Share Matrix. And what we've learned from that is that. Every single one, without a doubt has undiversified revenue. So they're kind of like

Jackson Boyar 20:15

Hmm.

James 20:16

And what I say by that is that bad revenue is cash cow revenue. It might seem

Jackson Boyar 20:21

Hmm.

James 20:21

attractive, you might be able to hit your quarterly numbers, your annual numbers, but in and of itself, if you were completely hemmed in and if you wanted to innovate, you can't innovate because you're put all your chips into events and passive membership. It's not even really active membership. Good revenue, sparks m ore revenue, and it's everything we've talked about in this call, in this which is how do we create longitudinal journeys? How do we serve their forever member journey? How do we put people in the right sized communities to engage at kind of an intimate level where you can really engage and kind of solve problems? And how do you think creatively about shifting membership from a goal to an outcome. And the outcome is, I feel connected here. I feel wanted here. I feel useful here. I feel like I can contribute, and I have met these really cool people. I'm like in my mid fifties, and I just don't, that's not how most of my, as a member, member of, of a

Jackson Boyar 21:30

Hmm.

James 21:31

actually, it's not really felt like that. So good revenue is linked to that phenomenon I am describing. Bad revenue is relying on 20% of your membership and going back to that well asking them to pay for more. Good revenue would be distributing that revenue across internal market that is largely untapped. And the internal market would be your passive members of people who just pay membership that tend not to do nearly anything else.

Jackson Boyar 22:04

Hmm.

James 22:05

So there's an internal market, I think that if they were engaged in really interesting, compelling community forward initiatives, just from a financial perspective, would pay you more over time.

Jackson Boyar 22:22

Hmm.

James 22:23

So good revenue to me is infectious, it's contagious and it is built off a design. It is not throwing spaghetti out there and, hoping something sticks.

Jackson Boyar 22:34

So let's talk about the innovation lifecycle. If, if you're advising me as an association, CEO, to, I'm gonna try to find good revenue through product innovation. What should my expectations be? Is it that I need to earn the right to drive that revenue by building the belonging and the connection and community you're describing? Or are there small experiments that can become a proof of concept that speaks to a board that shows numbers and results?

James 23:04

It is probably somewhere in the middle there. I'm a big fan not my, not my phrase, but what I would call small experiments and it's, it, it, it's hard to get associations who are almost universally resource strapped and again, put their eggs in all these one basket, so therefore their capabilities tend not to be in, how do I serve the journey? How do I create really interesting and compelling value? How do I test that value, low stakes, in the watering holes of the events or in, in some way in which you kind of create an innovation group.

Jackson Boyar 23:40

Hmm.

James 23:41

I hesitated that phrase, but I think they're important. It's kind of what we're talking about when we get these, you know, small, high impact, high energy groups together and say, go. Just, just identify a problem and get together across boundaries and, either create a framework, a structure, a process, maybe an outcome, maybe some new, new products the all or nothing, let's create a product that's going to transform our revenue.

Jackson Boyar 24:11

Hmm.

James 24:12

Feels like a risk. And I'm in, I'm in product and I'm in community. Those are my two disciplines. The ideal thing is that they come together and they merge as an essential tension between those two concepts,

Jackson Boyar 24:24

Hmm.

James 24:24

It is inherently difficult to go to the board and say, we are going to invest, we are gonna become a certification centric association. Now, there's some pluses to becoming a certification centric association but largely it's an extrinsic, model to get people to serially pay into continuing professional education. That's the opposite of creating a community. So it's really difficult with that business model and it's, it's there and it's prevailing and it's also like really bad adult learning. It's like the, the opposite of really good adult learning. So because we can't predict the future and we're undergoing this enormous change. The best way, the only way is to say we have this existing value and we have more than we think we do. And I'm not talking about, Hey, let's record it and put it online. That's always an option, but that tends not to sell. Where are the hidden nuggets? What is leverageable? What might we combine or bring together to create, some circles around saying, what problems are we trying to solve and what value do we currently have and how might we creatively, let's test two

Jackson Boyar 25:42

Hmm.

James 25:43

in the new year, and I would say the two products are probably based around cohorts or pathways. Our big phrase in product community is compound value.

Jackson Boyar 25:58

Hmm.

James 25:58

The old model, the old phrase is benefits. The new model is how do we spark people to get engaged and involved to not only learn, but to also create learning and to create new value. And in and of itself, compound value means it's, we're not retired yet, my wife and I, but we're getting up there. compound the power of compound interest, is it, it it works and it is true. All this money we put away in our twenties and thirties and forties,

Jackson Boyar 26:28

Hmm.

James 26:29

now makes money. A compound value design for an association is based in people. It's human centric, and it's based in what you and I have discussed, freedom to experiment

Jackson Boyar 26:44

Hmm.

James 26:44

to see what works and what might resonate, and that means freedom to fail sometimes. You will always learn from these experiments, and what you learn isn't like, well, that worked or that didn't work. You're learning about who your members are, what makes them tick, and what makes them want to come back for more that's what a good small experiment is, but the cautiousness around them because of the cash cow revenue, because of all the structural constraints. And sometimes the expectations of our members, because we are in the passive consumption business, I think their expectations of us have been lowered.

Jackson Boyar 27:25

Hmm. Well, I'm gonna put you on the spot and ask you to talk about an organization. It could be an association, but maybe it's a Fortune 500 company that does the things you described, cohorts or pathways well, I think often there is systemic and cultural debt within associations that leads to less risk taking behavior, less small experiments as you described, but maybe looking at a couple models for inspiration could help folks think about what this looks like in practice. Is there anybody who does it really well?

James 28:06

Where I got the idea was from product incubation, which I know is common in corporate. There was a visionary at George Mason University when I was there, when I was a fairly young librarian, late twenties, and again, I always had this kind of subversive in a good way, subversive energy to say, Hey, we're librarians but if we hang around in the library, I mean, we're not gonna go outta business, but we're not gonna get increase budgets. We need to get out there and embed ourselves in the lifeblood of the campus.

Jackson Boyar 28:40

Hmm.

James 28:40

So this guy's name was John O'Connor. He is since retired. It was called New Century College. It was a college within a college. And it was an incubator in the way that it completely threw away the registrar calendar. Most of higher ed does things that you would recognize associations do. All campuses are organized by disciplines and departments.

Jackson Boyar 29:00

Hmm.

James 29:01

Well, guess what? The world does not operate by disciplines and departments. Is this an engineering problem? Yes, it's an engineering problem, but it has flavors of healthcare and it has flavors of policy, and it has flavors of business, and there's an, there's economics involved to it. The world's a fricking messy place, and most campuses are designed to not train us for that. If that's the verb we even want to use anymore in higher ed, probably is the verb that's preferred. It, it trains us to major in a discipline and then get a job and then realize how ill-equipped we are. So anyway, it was all based off of interdisciplinary problem solving in high impact teams at the faculty level and at the student level, it was, it was all based off of what used to be brand new, but now it's become more common, although it's, I'm still not seeing this model as much. Competency based learning, roll up the sleeves, solve the problem, apply the problem to real world.

Jackson Boyar 30:02

Hmm.

James 30:02

and it was a hotbed for basically these students would leave and create institutions or organizations. I don't know if they created companies, but it was definitely ripe for that. I think if we had an, a competency around entrepreneurship, it would've really, we would've drawn a, a different type of student,

Jackson Boyar 30:24

Hmm.

James 30:25

but it was like faculty from across the discipline. Sorry, I'm not answering your question, but the structural constraints about the model that we're talking about are overcomeable, if that's a word. It's, it is, what we're talking about here. Small, small experiments, working in groups, intimate engagement, connecting those engagement groups into using, using just like basic network science to say who is our membership and how might we map that membership to understand where the nodes are,

Jackson Boyar 30:55

Hmm.

James 30:55

and then how do we connect those nodes. So I write about this a lot in my newsletter. And the other thing I write about a lot is systems and how do we create systems that make the old model, makes the new model irreplaceable.

Jackson Boyar 31:11

Hmm.

James 31:11

And that's, I think, what you're trying to do with RallyBoard. And what I'm trying to do with Product Community is to try and say, okay, here's what at, at the heart of what we do, we come together across boundaries with shared interests to solve really interesting problems. That's your compound value model. If you do those, those things really, really well. You can connect people over time to solve really interesting problems. If it's the broadcast model where all members get, all the same members, get the exact same thing, and it's a consumption model, and it's just passive information, you're gonna get an audience that is not super engaged

Jackson Boyar 31:46

Hmm.

James 31:46

and you're gooing to be fighting uphill to get them to engage.

Jackson Boyar 31:48

Yeah, I, I think there is magic in the in-person event experience if you're the right persona. It's expensive. It's obviously a business risk as you've described, but it is kind of a blunt force approach because it's saying, let's put 20,000 people in the same convention center and, and there will be magic. But we're not gonna do too much more than think about content tracks and hope people find the right connections there. What you're describing is something much more precise, and problem oriented and, and grassroots. And I think the orchestration to make that possible is, is largely what's been missing. 'Cause I don't know that many could imagine doing it, there aren't many examples out there that I've seen so far.

James 32:32

Yeah, and that's why I went kind of quiet. I know there's examples that I can't think of, but they'd be more kind of like, super creative nonprofits. There's this really cool book I read a couple years on, impact networks and basically what an impact network is, is that basically they out and out say, all organizations are kind of designed to be traditional and conservative and rigid and risk averse. All, they just snap to this. That's how we organize and, focus on running our organizations, non-profit for-profit, whatever, but an impact network can shed that.

Jackson Boyar 33:08

Hmm.

James 33:09

And they can start to think outside of that, even though their own organization kind of is hierarchical and somewhat bureaucratic and has a board and all that, all all the things that, that would afford for stability. But when you start connecting them and you start focusing on this larger problem, it comes alive.

Jackson Boyar 33:28

Hmm.

James 33:29

So that, that model, I think the book is just called Impact Networks. Is something that I think we are uniquely equipped to participate in, but completely, like 20 years behind the curve, our think, like our thinking isn't there. I think the notion, I, I had an article maybe two or three years ago, I went to, this ASAE, which is known as our association of association, so association professionals join American Society of Association Executives. And I was just completely underwhelmed. And I got back and I wrote this article about, well, what can an annual, if we, if we have all of our chips in an annual meeting, how might we leverage it? And to think of it as a way to leverage network science or a way to incubate and seed new ideas, do that small experiment thing, and then to try and make it the beginning of a pathway for three groups of 10. Those three ideas, what are you doing? You're your seeding agency, your seeding members who would otherwise just hang out with their buddies. Now, that's a positive thing, but how networks work is you wanna connect that group with another group who would never otherwise meet

Jackson Boyar 34:49

Yeah.

James 34:50

The way we used to talk about it on campus. I worked for George Mason, Emory Riddle. I worked for a startup called Harrisburg University, and I worked for Lehigh University. You could work together for 40 years in the same campus and never

Jackson Boyar 35:05

Yeah.

James 35:06

meet each other. The only way you could possibly meet if you worked in the library or IT, or in the engineering department or the is see if you got in a car accident in the parking lot. It's just not designed for leveraging, well, how do we best solve how to improve undergraduate learning?

Jackson Boyar 35:24

Yeah. Well, as you know, in my past life. The

James 35:27

question would be completely fragmentedly answered if it was even addressed at all 'cause it would just come up through the deans and just existing silos. And so you never really get at a really interesting, compelling answer. You just get something that you have to answer on an accreditation form or something, you know.

Jackson Boyar 35:43

Yeah. Well, I want to, wrap up with a couple more provocative questions. You've alluded to some of your views on what associations aren't doing today, and I'd love to dig into that a bit more. You know, if there were one thing that you could wave a wand and every association would stop doing this one thing, what would that be?

James 36:07

Stop putting all our eggs in one basket. I mean, the, the, the positive part of that would be what I, the question I pose, which is who do we serve? Well, we, we serve the member. The new question is we serve the forever member journey and we start to design, what I would call a longitudinal engagement model. And so the old capability would be association staff live to serve. The new model would be association staff co-create journeys with members. And that capability is no offense to our dear colleagues, absent.

Jackson Boyar 36:49

Hmm.

James 36:50

And that is to me, an achievable design question. It's a compelling design question and it would wake people up who've been lulled into sitting in hotel rooms, watching PowerPoints. That's kind of our prevailing delivery system.

Jackson Boyar 37:07

Hmm.

James 37:08

It's not a great way to create community, to get people to mix up. And I wrote an article about networking that's also broken. There are ways that you can design networking that's based around durable long-term connection as opposed to short-term business card collecting.

Jackson Boyar 37:28

Yeah.

James 37:28

So designing for community, I view as an untested frontier that I think we've only kind of passively put our toe in and we lack the courage, the time, the resources, to really dig deep

Jackson Boyar 37:48

into

James 37:48

that problem to become what I would, think we have the opportunity to be indispensable and that setting that super high bar is key.

Jackson Boyar 37:59

I think it's a great place to to end because, I'm an optimist as an entrepreneur and, you are too. I, I believe you stated the problem very clearly. What does it mean to design our value propositions around community and not this passive consumption model where we listen to lectures and archive the newsletter or the update that comes through. So look forward to your leadership, within Product Community. I hope our listeners go and check it out. And I want to thank you, James for joining today.

James 38:33

This was fun. To be continued. Thank you, Jackson. Cheers.