What is a consultant and how do you know if you need one?  A consultant is someone from outside your company or association who makes his or her skills, knowledge, and experience available to an enterprise in an advisory role, including implementation and education.  You may need one if the growth of your business has slowed, or worse, stalled out.  Continued growth is essential for success. Hiring a consultant can put you back on track to grow.  Below are 5 reasons why hiring a consultant may be exactly what your business needs.

How HighRoad can bring the best of Instructional Design to your organization through Optimum 5.

Analyze-Design-Develop-Implement-Evaluate: The ADDIE model has been the workhorse and standard in Instructional Design for decades.  While other models have evolved through-out the past 4 decades, the ADDIE model remains a constant because of its simplicity, flexibility and effectiveness. 

With the workforce seeing an ever-growing multi-generational gap of adult learners, it’s important to understand the common characteristics of adult learners and how you can best meet the needs of working professional students. 

This month’s HighRoad U topic is near and dear to my heart. As a former economist, I do love my pivot tables, but the marketer in me is the one that loves to ask all those questions and hunt for insights and patterns. Marketers and Analysts will always enjoy hunting for data or information that provide insight into questions such as:

Your association is sitting on a gold mine.  The mine is your Association Management System(AMS), and the gold is the member data within it.  All the information that you have already gathered about your members can be used to greatly increase engagement rates with them.  Using this data can also increase your overall membership numbers.  Angie Karpouzis, at Aptify, has written an article on how to best utilize your existing member data in order to better understand who your members are, and what they need.  

I’ve been singing the praises of persona development since the day I started at HighRoad and I’m seeing that the market is starting to pick up that same message – I see a lot of conference sessions reference the value and importance of persona development, which is fantastic! Organizations (not just the marketing team), need to know who they’re targeting if they want to be able to market effectively. More importantly, and this is why personas matter, you really need to understand what motivates and drives your target audiences. What are they interested in? How do they spend their day? What are their pain points? How do they consume the information you send them? What information do they consume? Are they extroverts or introverts? Are they likely to respond to social media outreach or do they prefer traditional email? How much free time do they have? Are they Baby Boomers, Millennials or Gen X and does that matter when it comes to promoting your programs?