event strategy - Event Solutions

Turn Your Conference Into an Association Growth Engine

For months, your staff has been planning. You select a destination. Negotiate hotel contracts. Build the agenda. Recruit speakers. Sell sponsorships. Open registration. Answer approximately 4,732 questions about dietary restrictions, hotel reservations, session times, and whether someone can still get the early registration rate three weeks after it expired. Then the conference happens. Three days […]

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Stop Running Programs. Start Building Ecosystems.

Certification / ellen

Most certification-driven organizations think they’re managing a certification program. They’re not. They’re managing an ecosystem. The problem is that many organizations don’t realize the difference. As a result, they spend enormous amounts of time optimizing individual programs while the overall experience remains fragmented. It’s like owning a zoo and focusing exclusively on feeding the giraffes.

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Transactional Revenue and Certification: A Systems Approach

Certification / ellen

Most associations think they have a certification revenue strategy. What they actually have… is a series of disconnected purchases. Someone registers for a certification exam.Then maybe they buy continuing education.Then maybe they attend the annual conference.Then maybe they renew. Or maybe they disappear into the professional-development witness protection program and are never heard from again.

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From Course Catalog to Career Pathway

Certification / ellen

Let’s be honest. Most continuing education programs look like someone emptied a filing cabinet onto a webpage and added a search filter. Webinars. PDFs. On-demand courses. Conference sessions. Maybe a badge or two floating around somewhere. Technically? It’s education. Strategically? It’s a Costco-sized content warehouse with no map. And then leadership wonders: Most CE programs

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Why Members Disappear After Certification

Certification / ellen

… The Ecosystem is broken Many associations celebrate the moment a member earns certification. The emails go out.The social posts get published.Leadership celebrates another successful candidate. And then… silence. Six months later: At first glance, it looks like a retention problem. It’s not. It’s an ecosystem problem. Because certification was treated like the finish line

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