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Suzanne Carawan

Blog Feature

By: Suzanne Carawan
December 12th, 2017

HighRoad Supports the ASAE Community Year After Year

Blog Feature

By: Suzanne Carawan
December 5th, 2017

 

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We're one day closer to 2018 and as a way to wrap up the year, we're proud to sponsor the Top 40 Association CEOs of 2017 event which happens tonight in Crystal City. You can see the full list of association CEO winners.

Winning recognition as an association CEO is no easy feat in today's changing political and economic landscape. One of the areas that we see our clients' most struggle is in digital transformation and trying to figure out how to effectively compete in markets where for-profit companies are edging in for their share of wallet traditionally taken up by the association.

In 2017, we've seen multiple associations ask us for help in putting together a growth strategy based largely in digital to combat for-profit corporations. Associations have long understood the power and value of their brand, but have not had strong lead generation capabilities. The for-profit companies, on the other hand, typically are building a brand and are close to unknown, but have strong lead generation capabilities and agile market response times that allow for rapid growth.

Blog Feature

By: Suzanne Carawan
November 8th, 2017

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Today marks the second day of Association Success.org's SURGE 2017. The virtual conference is in its inaugural year and aims to put thought leaders together to discuss the disruption that is occurring in the association industry. We are proud to support the conference as a founding sponsor because we see how the association industry is changing on a daily basis.

The top areas for disruption in associations (from our perspective) fall into the following areas:

1) Executive Leadership: the need to find digitally-savvy executives that have track records in revenue growth

2) The Right Personnel: ensuring that the organization has staff with digital skill sets and the right tools to do value-added work in an efficient and effective manner

Blog Feature

By: Suzanne Carawan
March 14th, 2017

Behold the Power of Pi

Today is National Pi Day. Not peach, blueberry or apple, but the math pi---the 3.14 or the 22/7 kind that you learned about somewhere along the way. If you are still stuck in yesteryear when math wasn't seen as a cool endeavor, math is now super cool and Pi Day is now a thing. There are a lot of great websites devoted to Pi Day, schools hold special math events and there's even a rap video about Pi.

The more you know about Pi, the more interesting it gets. Did you know everyone's birthday month and day can be found in Pi? Albert Einstein was born on March 14th? The curiosities of Pi abound and so do the stories surrounding Pi.

This combination of being global, outside of politics, intimate through personal experience of a shared education and universal truth, makes Pi a marketing goldmine. While many brands are trying to find these common grounds from which to make personal connections to individuals, it seems there are too few "safe zones" that we can utilize to connect people together.

The smart brands that can see the value of Pi Day and connect it with their brands are winning out. I have had several offers in my inbox today that all have leveraged Pi Day for special offers and a way to cut through the email clutter that now is the norm for the email user.

One of my particular favorites is from Restaurant.com who uses the snappy headline of "Pi Day Deals in Your Radius". The preview text then goes on to offer $15 certificates for only $3.14 and urges me to have Pi Day My Way.

Restaurant.com's Email Subject Line & Preview Text for National Pi Day

Blog Feature

By: Suzanne Carawan
September 23rd, 2016

I'm either proud or ashamed (on any given day it varies) to say that I've been in and out of the association world for about 20 years so I have a certain longitudinal perspective on trends and certainly, on digital technology adoption. I worked at National League for Nursing way back in 1996 while I was studying at Columbia in an admin role and the only reason we had a computer was for email.  Over the course of twenty years, I was here for the advent of websites moving from brochureware to content management systems and was on the front wave when social media and mobile hit.

I've worked on every type of software product that associations use and how to best apply these to business challenges. What that translates into is hundreds of completed projects and probably more that weren't completed because of shifting priorities, summer Fridays off and slashed budgets. Hundreds? Yes, I mean hundreds and that probably equates to thousands of meetings spent consulting with associations cross-departmentally to understand how their normal course of business can translate to digital, how digital can be used to promote, measure and increase their brand reach and how workflow processes change when digital is central to the process.

So here we are in 2016 and I'm fascinated to see that there is a new trend emerging that is busting up the predominant philosophy that has governed association management thinking for the last 20 years:

Stop the do-it-yourself (DIY) madness and outsource the work.

Blog Feature

By: Suzanne Carawan
September 15th, 2016

Marketing Funnel that HighRoad Can Help Your Association to Get Right

The marketing automation craze has finally hit the association market! Whether you're getting calls from vendors that you've never heard of, or hearing about great metrics that other associations are getting, everyone seems to want to talk about marketing automation! Since we are the only digital agency in the association space that provides implementation, integration and strategic consulting services around marketing automation (and because we offer more than 1 platform, we aren't biased towards only pushing one software product), we thought we should step up to the plate and offer to everyone the basics of marketing automation in a free workshop.