Help move your organization to greater discipline, focus, and value Association leaders must be disciplined strategists, focusing the organizations they serve on value they can deliver and structuring accordingly to compete in the "new normal." Road to Relevance is the follow-up and complementary companion to the bestselling Race for Relevance: 5 Radical Changes for Associations, which identified six challenges that forever changed the association environment and five needed changes. Authors Harrison Coerver and Mary Byers, CAE, provide real insight into how to adapt the strategies of Road to Relevance to your organization's circumstances. Clearly explaining the five key strategies, the authors show you how to: Identify strengths that deserve a concentration of resources Achieve a coordinated product and service portfolio Root out marginal or underperforming activities that are negatively impacting your organization Case studies, adaptable examples, and provocative questions help you use the insights from Road to Relevance to lead your organization to an ever-more-valued, sustainable, and relevant future.

Explores the current context, role, and challenges of post-secondary education and presents options for promising pathways forward. The post-secondary educational system has undergone dramatic changes and experienced immense stress in the past two decades. Once regarded as the logical next step toward career opportunities and financial security, higher education is a subject of growing uncertainty for millions of people across the United States. It is more common than ever to question the return on investment, skyrocketing cost, and student debt burden of going to college. Prospective students, and many employers, increasingly view attending institutions of higher learning as inadequate preparation for entering the 21st century workforce. High-profile scandals—financial impropriety, sexual abuse, restrictions of free speech, among others—have further eroded public trust. In response to these and other challenges, leading voices are demanding strengthened accountability and measurable change. Higher Education's Road to Relevance illustrates why change is needed in post-secondary education and offers practical solutions to pressing concerns. The authors, internationally recognized experts in college-level teaching and learning innovation, draw heavily from contemporary research to provide an integrative approach for post-secondary faculty, staff, and administrators of all levels. This timely book helps readers identify the need for leadership in developing new networks and ecosystems of learning and workforce development. This valuable book will help readers: Understand the forces driving change in higher education Develop multiple pathways to create and credential self-directed learners Promote access to flexible, cost-effective, and relevant learning Adapt structures and pedagogies to address issues and overcome challenges Use an inclusive approach that extends to employers, K-12 educators, post-secondary educators, and policy-makers, among others Higher Education's Road to Relevance is a much-needed resource for college and university administrators, academic researchers, instructors and other faculty, and staff who support and interact with students.

Race for Relevance provides a no-nonsense look at today's realities and how associations operate and what they need to do to remain relevant in the future. Based on more than 40 years of combined experience working with more than 1,000 organizations, the authors examine 5 key areas where the traditional approach that organizations have taken in the past needs to be altered. The 5 key areas of change are: Overhaul the governance model and committee operations (and get the right people focused on the right things). Empower the CEO and leverage staff expertise. Zero in on your member market. Rationalize programs and services--and focus where you can have an effect. Get the supporting technology framework right. The book includes worksheets, checklists, and case studies all geared towards helping association leaders--staff and volunteers alike--to kick off the thought-provoking discussions that are generally at the forefront of change, be prepared for those fighting for the status quo, and to implement change without sacrificing your influence. Order a copy today for all of your association leaders and start your drive to thrive.

Your Value Proposition is not your Elevator Pitch, Positioning Statement, or Unique Selling Proposition. Your Value Proposition is the sum total of all the value you bring to your prospects, clients, strategic partners, and even your employees. Your Value Proposition is the foundation of your business. No value proposition = No business! In today's world of marketing-message overload, the most effective way to grab someone's attention is through radically relevant and critically compelling messaging. Communicating a relevant and compelling value proposition has always been a critical part of winning new business. And your overwhelmed prospects and clients need and even expect your value proposition to be bullseye relevant and continually compelling. In Radical Relevance, Hall of Fame marketer and speaker Bill Cates, lays out your complete road map to discover, formulate, and communicate your value proposition in a way that will be irresistible to just the right prospects, compel them to follow your recommendations, and repel prospects who aren't a perfect fit. Remember: if you try to appeal to everyone, you run the risk of appealing to no one.It's time to take a stand with your value!It's time to get Radically Relevant!

How new membership models can help associations survive and thrive in today's evolving environment The era when associations could count on members joining and renewing, even with a relatively unchanging menu of membership benefits, has passed. No, membership is not dead, argues author Sarah Sladek. But associations do need to change their thinking and their models. In The End of Membership As We Know It: Building the Fortune-Flipping, Must-Have Association of the Next Century, Sladek offers practical, proven ways that associations can respond to changes affecting participation such as the generational shifts in the workforce, social changes, and technology-eased access to content and community. The End of Membership As We Know It explains: How niche the new competitive advantage is Why organizational culture has an enormous impact on recruitment and retention What emerging member-prospects value and want Why and how to focus on member ROI instead of program ROI How to craft and deliver compelling benefits rather than features How to extend your reach Which emerging models are taking root and showing promise Providing numerous real-world examples along with specific guidance, The End of Membership As We Know It is a must-have guide for moving your membership model into the future.

Branding guru Aaker shows how to eliminate the competition and become the lead brand in your market This ground-breaking book defines the concept of brand relevance using dozens of case studies-Prius, Whole Foods, Westin, iPad and more-and explains how brand relevance drives market dynamics, which generates opportunities for your brand and threats for the competition. Aaker reveals how these companies have made other brands in their categories irrelevant. Key points: When managing a new category of product, treat it as if it were a brand; By failing to produce what customers want or losing momentum and visibility, your brand becomes irrelevant; and create barriers to competitors by supporting innovation at every level of the organization. Using dozens of case studies, shows how to create or dominate new categories or subcategories, making competitors irrelevant Shows how to manage the new category or subcategory as if it were a brand and how to create barriers to competitors Describes the threat of becoming irrelevant by failing to make what customer are buying or losing energy David Aaker, the author of four brand books, has been called the father of branding This book offers insight for creating and/or owning a new business arena. Instead of being the best, the goal is to be the only brand around-making competitors irrelevant.

Marketing, when you boil it all down, deals with just two things: figuring out who you want to sell to and then determining how you are going to get them to buy your product, service, or idea. In Relevance: The Power to Change Minds and Behavior and Stay Ahead of the Competition, Andrea Coville, who heads a global marketing and public relations agency, successfully showed us how to get today's busy, distracted consumers to buy. Booklist called Relevance a thought-provoking guide to success in today's noisy communications world. Here, in her follow-up work, Coville's focus is on helping you create Relevance in our current moment of uncertainty caused by the pandemic, social unrest, and ever-increasing technological change. She lays out, in step-by-step fashion, what you need to do and how to do it. And Coville also provides numerous case studies--profiling large global companies, smaller firms, nonprofits, and universities--who have created Relevance successfully. It has never been more difficult to get people to listen to what you have to say. Coville explains why you have to create deep, lasting, and mutually satisfying relationships with the people who keep you in business--and then she shows you how to do it. By the time you are done reading, you will have a series of strategies that have been proven to work when it comes to changing minds and behavior, strategies that will help you stay ahead of the competition. You will also be able to craft an effective marketing strategy that will allow your message to reach today's busy, distracted customers (a description that fits just about everyone you are trying to reach). As Richard Cote, executive director for Advancement at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth, correctly points out: Whether you work for an Ivy League college, a nonprofit organization, or a for-profit enterprise, there is one common thread and path to success: people relationships. That means understanding the needs, the hopes, the aspirations of people and making those come alive in the services and products you represent. Andy's book on Relevance nails this point crisply. You can have the best offering in the world, highly designed and expertly targeted, but without a real, relevant connection to people, it will go nowhere. Her book provides a step-by-step program on not only building relevance to your audiences or customers but sustaining and expanding it. The book, Creating Relevance in a Time of Uncertainty, provides both the diagnosis and the prescription with well-articulated cases and proven methodology. It's a must-read for leaders who seek the people-centered 'secret sauce' that differentiates your organization or enterprise and propels it forward in the midst of tough competition and global economic and pandemic headwinds.

In this long-awaited book from the world’s premier brand expert and author of the seminal work Building Strong Brands, David Aaker shows managers how to construct a brand portfolio strategy that will support a company’s business strategy and create relevance, differentiation, energy, leverage, and clarity. Building on case studies of world-class brands such as Dell, Disney, Microsoft, Sony, Dove, Intel, CitiGroup, and PowerBar, Aaker demonstrates how powerful, cohesive brand strategies have enabled managers to revitalize brands, support business growth, and create discipline in confused, bloated portfolios of master brands, subbrands, endorser brands, cobrands, and brand extensions. Renowned brand guru Aaker demonstrates that assuring that each brand in the portfolio has a clear role and actively reinforces and supports the other portfolio brands will profoundly affect the firm’s profitability. Brand Portfolio Strategy is required reading not only for brand managers but for all managers with bottom-line responsibility to their shareholders.

We are now living in a world of constant change and disruption. We can either see the world as a hurdle to or a limitless resource to engage, stimulate, and cultivate our imagination. In a globally networked world, information is getting easier and easier to access. What you actually do with that information is the new challenge. Leaders do the thinking and others execute. Organized training is not keeping pace with the demands of the workplace. On one hand, the shelf life of skills set is getting shorter and these may get obsolete fast. On the other hand, new careers are spawning which were not on the horizon a couple of years back. What is the way out for a leader, an executive or even a professional to remain relevant to workplace demands of the present as well as prepare for the future? The answer to all these questions is The VUCA Learner: Future-proof Your Relevance. As the world grows more complex and uncertain, opportunities for people with critical thinking, innovation and imagination are on the rise. Organizations are only as good as the people they employ. To stay relevant and grow in this unforgiving business environment, one needs to develop a learning mindset, where continuous lifelong learning becomes a daily habit, to let go of the old and become agile, adaptable and resilient. This book will showcase the various sources and methods for self-learning. Whether you are a fresher or a CEO, you must develop the learner’s mindset, scan the business environment for green shoots of opportunities, regularly conduct a skills gap analysis and use all the tools available to continuously reinvent yourself to be ready for new episodes in career. This book is a roadmap to making you future-ready!