Embracing Change and Innovation to Drive Association Growth With Artesha Moore, FASAE, CAE

Full Transcript

Bill Sheehan (00:00):

On this episode of Learning by Association.

Artesha Moore, FASAE, CAE (00:03):

I’m not knocking any of the alphabets. I’m saying we’re businesses and many of us as small businesses need to look at other small business industries and how they evolve, how they structure partnerships.

Bill Sheehan (00:15):

There’s that old saying, “The nonprofit status, it’s a tax code, not a business model.” Right?

Artesha Moore, FASAE, CAE (00:23):

Right. Money makes mission.

Bill Sheehan (00:26):

Welcome to Learning by Association, a podcast brought to you by D2L, where we delve into the ever evolving world of associations and the challenges they face in navigating the currents of change. I’m Bill Sheehan and I’m thrilled to be your host. Join me and our guests as we explore the role learning plays in driving associations forward and how it can impact every part of your organization from recruiting to engagement and renewals to staff development, business strategy and more. So let’s dive in.

(00:59):

Hi everyone. This is Bill Sheehan with D2L and having another exciting podcast in Learning by Association. And I have to tell you, I am beyond thrilled to have Artesha Moore on. It has been too long. You’re a dear friend. I am so happy to have you on this episode. This may be the fastest hour and 15, 20 minutes in anyone’s day. But for those of you who don’t know Artesha, she’s one of the most wonderful giving persons I’ve ever met. But on her day job, she is the president and CEO of Association Forum. And you have had a wonderful background in the association space and I don’t want to steal your thunder, but you’ve worked with some excellent, large organizations and had major impacts, like AGU and APIC, but I don’t want to steal your thunder. Artesha, one, welcome to the show and if you could just give us a little bit of background on how you got to where you are today that would be great.

Artesha Moore, FASAE, CAE (02:04):

First, thank you for having me back. This is a fantastic opportunity to sit with my friend and I’m going to try to keep it professional ’cause we are friends. We’re going to go all over the place. Hi everyone. I’m Artesha Moore and I am the CEO of Association Forum. I’m one of the rare people that call themselves an association professional. I’ve been doing this for over 25 years, and so I look young, but I’ve been out here grinding. I’ve had the joy of my association career to work at large scale associations like the American Geophysical Union that had a hundred thousand member community, but deeply academic, but also very entrepreneurial groups in STEM and in healthcare. So when I was with the Association for Professionals in Infection Control in the mid and early 2000s, they were really on an upward path. And our CEO at the time when I started there in 2005 said that we are a startup within an existing organization.

(03:06):

She wanted us to have for-profit technology startup speed acquisition. I learned business development and that wasn’t my trade. But even before that, I was with the National Society of Professional Engineers, very interesting model. I was an internal consultant and I went on the road for their hundred or so chapters, but really the 53 state societies. So having this kind of big arc.

(03:36):

And then the first association that I stumbled into and got my first job, it was maybe nine staff members. And so I’m almost full circle because I have a small staff here at Association Forum and I was talking earlier today about how I think in some aspect when you have 150 staff like the AGU, some things get lost in the bureaucracy of just doing. It’s eight of us. We’re like Miami Vice out here. We just speed boating it all over the place. But I think that that is helpful for what I’ve been charged to do here at Association Forum.

Bill Sheehan (04:12):

Well, you’ve done an excellent job and when I hear you have a staff of eight, and I just came from the Holiday Showcase, well it seems like yesterday.

Artesha Moore, FASAE, CAE (04:22):

It was yesterday.

Bill Sheehan (04:23):

But it was a wonderful event for D2L. And I know it was a wonderful event for a lot of the exhibitors and sponsors of the event. And to me it kind of helps solidify 2024 as being, and I might be looking through rose colored glasses, but I thought the association community’s really starting to get back into the old pre Covid type of offerings where you have on site meetings, in-person meetings, a lot of networking. I will tell you, and I’d like to chat a little bit about this because I think what you’re uncovering or what you’re doing at Holiday Showcase, other associations can really benefit, the blend of the educational sessions that you had plus the networking events to allow the suppliers to meet with some of the association staff, and I’m speaking from D2L’s perspective, I thought was second to none. And that’s not easy to do, particularly when some of the events are spread out throughout the hotel.

(05:30):

You did an excellent job of bringing that together. And with the staff, and I know it was eight, but it seemed like 50, the customer service you guys provided was excellent. And I think for the attendees, that is huge. But you really are onto something and how you’re really bringing content together in a very networking type of vibe. And what I mean by that, throughout the whole event, there wasn’t this arm’s length of, “I don’t want to go talk to these exhibitors ’cause I know they’re going to jump on me.” There was none of that. Very open.

(06:09):

So I’m just curious, and I know as a leader and the CEO of an organization, it starts at the top and you are very good about going around and saying, “How’s it going? Who do you want to meet? Let me see if I can make some introductions,” you found me on the floor to thank me for speaking there and that means a lot to exhibitors, what’s your mentality when it comes to those events for exhibitors? What do you want us, the attendees and the exhibitors to walk away feeling?

Artesha Moore, FASAE, CAE (06:37):

Connection, period. So let me start by saying shout out to the board of directors of Association Forum. The business strategy was about these pillars of community and content and connection. And for us, community is also exhibitors and sponsors. You’re not the funders, you’re part of the community. Many like you have been around for decades. Many have been on the side where I’m sitting right now working at an association before they go with the heart and their knowledge to help the supplier side, help us do our work. So at the forum, I’ve been in a lot of organizations where the funders were separate, “Give us the money and let us do.”

(07:27):

Well, in order to do and lead this turnaround, I actually went to our exhibitors first. I said, what is it that you love about the forum? I know what our members love. Here’s what they’re saying. How can we meet in the middle? So one of my big philosophies, if anything, is that I look for a four times win. And that is important. That’s something that I brought to the forum. In 2021, I was lucky enough to be inducted into ASAE’s class of fellows, and that changed my life. I mean, it just did. Me, I’m not even as learned as the rest of them. I’m just not. And I’m outspoken, and I wasn’t even a CEO at the time. So to be selected as a fellow was huge for me. That also validated that I wasn’t an anomaly. I was in the space that I was helping others. But once that happened, everything that I do now is about making sure that our career industry advances, not just the form, not just D2L as a partner, not just the member who’s there, giving them a valued experience. Service at all levels.

(08:43):

I’m also a deep cynic, as you know, will get into it, and so I hate sitting there with talking heads and we’ve spent thousands of dollars as a attendee and I can’t do none of this stuff when I get back to the office. Where they do that at? So I would say to our folks, I don’t pick any of it, people listening, I don’t pick the content, I don’t pick any of those things. I pick the Avengers that are my team and they deliver. But they’re going to deliver top quality, top service for all of the touch points. So thank you for that feedback because to us, that means that you all and our members are doing, I think the thing that changed my career for real was relationships. And so that’s what we’re about. Really high level content that’s usable in spaces that are interesting and unique design and relationships, and that’s what we want people to leave with.

Bill Sheehan (09:42):

And I want to touch on something ’cause I think Covid helped, I guess, speed this up, for lack of a better word. And I’ve been in the association business 38 years, and I’ve been both an association executive and a supplier, and there’s times where there was just a bit of discord between the suppliers and the association staff because I think there was just some bad actors out there that were very aggressive, and it kind of gave all of suppliers this aura of being very aggressive, not understanding the association space. You just want to sell your product and move on. And I think Covid helped change that a little bit.

(10:30):

And here’s what I mean by that, and I’d love to get your opinion on this, if the association world is becoming more interconnected. I think for the first time in association history, and again, this is just my opinion, that everybody was in the same boat at the same time with the same problems. Associations, sometimes all verticals of the industries are not affected by economic downturns. They’re not affected by other types of issues that may hit the economy. But Covid affected everybody. And I think what happened is prior to Covid, the supplier community, the exhibitors, they always wanted the associations to be successful. “How can we help you?” But I think during Covid and after Covid, we needed you to be successful because we relied on you for our growth.

(11:21):

But I think what happened is that the supplier community could actually provide not only resources such as time and money, but also some intellectual capital because a company like D2L for example, is talking to thousands of associations involved in learning. So we can bring some experience and some knowledge transfer to associations who are either trying to get into that. Do you see that now that there’s actually a more harmonious type of relationship now in the community? I hope.

Artesha Moore, FASAE, CAE (11:53):

Yes, I do. Yes. I am going to come at it from a couple of different sides. One is from the demographic shift. So yes, I would say right before 2020 and Covid and the pandemic did impact all of our pocketbooks. My grandma would say our pocketbooks. All everybody’s pocketbook was messed up. But really it started to shift in 2018. It was like a blip. More associations were hiring non-traditional association CEOs because their boards were saying, we want to digitally transform or we want to shift in the marketplace. Our industry needs to be modernized or future… So they brought in a lot of business leaders into association. So that happened right around, started ’18, ’19.

(12:44):

Then 2020 happened, and all of us had to really start to innovate how we did business. We were all in it together, so our supplier partners and us, but now we have, I would say a critical need to innovate truly. Our meetings are blown up. We don’t have the tech because we haven’t invested in that for years. So now we need some partnerships and some thinking. I will also say, when you started to say that our partners can aggregate kind of information across associations, you know, Bill, like I know, I’m just going to tell the truth to the people now, that I don’t really care what other associations are doing. I always think about what is Elon doing? Maybe I shouldn’t say it like that. What is the for-profit person doing, because that’s how in my 20 plus years in associations, I’m not knocking any of the alphabets. I’m saying we’re businesses and many of us as small businesses need to look at other small business industries and how they evolve, how they structure partnerships.

(13:50):

And that’s one of the things that I’m blessed to say here at Association Forum and in our board, they are risk-takers, but it was because of a severe need of a turnaround. We were losing hundreds of thousands, like many associations were. It wasn’t just that our partners wanted to… The partners also, unless you guys have a vault that I don’t know about, D2L, the partners also have constraints. They have an ROI that associations don’t always understand, association leaders. “Well, Bill is my friend, and he came to the reception and he…” Bill has a boss, Bill has a boss who has a board.

(14:32):

And so as we start to look at things, I’m always very interested in what is it that you dream about that your board is dreaming about because maybe we’re all dreaming about the same thing. And that we could bring interesting conversations for me as a secondary society to expose association leaders to new ways of thinking, things that maybe are radical that the board would never go for it. Well, now they’re going to be open to it because we’re trying all kinds of things to keep the associations aligned with what their missions are for. It isn’t to make money at the meeting. That’s not what the mission says. Maybe it is. If it does say that, please send it to me because I want to see it, but I don’t think so. We’re the business of the heart, the industry of the heart, the industry of the future, meaning certification and valuation of people and really coming up with curricula and competency models and those particular things are aligned for the future, not for the present. But in order to do that, we got to make money.

Bill Sheehan (15:39):

And there’s that old saying, “The nonprofit status, it’s a tax code, not a business model.” Right?

Artesha Moore, FASAE, CAE (15:47):

Money makes mission.

Bill Sheehan (15:49):

It does. It does. And you’ve touched on something, and I think you’ve been very successful at this because I have met several of your board members and interacted with them, and they’re great. I won’t say they have the same amount of energy and intellect and contagious nature that you have when getting everyone on board, but I do think that board is so critical in making sure that the association is kind of moving in the direction that they hired you to do. As a leader of the industry, you have to really rely on that board to make sure they have your back, so to speak. And I think that really starts from you in building that board. And I think you’re looking at those organizations and those leaders within those, in this case, associations to be on that board. Is that a difficult objective as a leader for an association? How do you build that board and to… And it takes time, I know. It takes time.

Artesha Moore, FASAE, CAE (16:50):

It does. It does. Because my situation right now is very unique. So I’m going to take it actually back to both the AGU and to APIC because I was involved as a staff lead in changing the infrastructure of how it was done. So at APIC, what we did was early on in this very entrepreneurial CEO’s timeframe, and she had her sights on something that was a grand challenge, how to really get rid of infections. Who thought that as an association of nurses? We just taken on the whole… Okay, let’s go. All right. But in order to do that in the beginning, she had board members, not anything, but the culture was that these mostly women on the board were nurses by trade that went into an admin side of nursing, were crocheting in the boardroom. They had a very, not even a risk tolerance, I don’t even think they understood what that meant. They didn’t see the need for this huge investment that would pay off and the relationships.

(18:06):

We were doing deals with Clorox’s global marketing team as a small 10 person a size association, but she had sold a package for a million dollars and it was unheard of at the time. So what we did was worked with the board to say, what competencies do you need to lead, business acumen and these things and such and such at the time? And then based on that work, I worked with the committee to re-engineer the application, the interviewing, the polling, the various pieces around the conflicts of interest, the education.

(18:47):

It took years. But then you start to see that a board in five year time, so I would say two to three years, we were having boards that were able to have conversations that led to starting a for-profit company. A small association that was only 10 million, $12 million, who are you to start your own company? But they understood those kinds of things. So that was a wonderful example. It took years. I was there for 13 years, to be able to see it change in a timeframe of the type of conversations. But it started at the top.

(19:23):

At the AGU, love y’all beautifully academic, I came there, they had already with Chris McEntee, who was the CEO at the time, she’s like, I don’t know, my Beyonce. She’d just be out here doing things. But she had worked for a decade to work on that governance model, to get the various pieces. But academia, you all know, maybe you can tell me some things, academia sometimes is painful because you’ve got a council of a committee of a committee to say, we’re going to put two periods in this sentence. What are you talking about? So it was a very beautifully advanced governance model that was brought down to painful screeching halts because of how academic frameworks and leadership are set up. There’s a tenure mentality that happens in an organization, especially when you’re a hundred years old and you’ve got a hundred million in reserve and you’ve got an endowment from the government and you’ve got these things.

(20:27):

When you’re like, again, where I am at Association Forum and the board, the board is open because we were unfortunately during the pandemic, we were bleeding. We were bleeding like many small staff associations were, and we needed to do things radically differently. And they hired a CEO who speaks the truth. And one of things that we say on our board over and over again is, say the thing, even if it’s uncomfortable. There are times that my whole body is sweating and it’s not hot flashes, even though I’m of that age. It’s uncomfortable to hear their fears. But if you make it safe for everybody, the staff is in there too. I don’t put the staff out to say, “Don’t say that because I…” No, they understand exactly what we’re doing, how much money we lost, we didn’t lose it this year, and what we’re trying to do. But we say the thing. And that has made a huge difference here at Association Forum, I think too.

Bill Sheehan (21:29):

Yeah. And I wonder, and since you have worked on both large and small associations, I do recall back in the day, and I mean back in the day, I mean the ’90s, early 2000s up into the mid 2015, ’16, those associations that were big, and when I talk big, I’m saying an association that’s, let’s say over $20 million in revenue, and it can go much higher, but let’s sit in that… There was a tendency for associations glide and be innovative at a very slow pace because they didn’t want to upset the apple cart. Board happy. Right?

Artesha Moore, FASAE, CAE (22:08):

Exactly.

Bill Sheehan (22:09):

What was happening is, and I think that’s where sometimes associations lose their reason for being, really their to protect, promote and advance in industry and being on top of that wave to see the horizon and making sure that they’re ahead of the technology curve in the lake. But I think in the late 2000, around ’18 and ’19, and then when Covid hit, I think all that went out the window and they really started to have to think innovatively and move much quicker. And I think it helped the leaders who were looking at their board of directors saying, to your point, “We need to tell you the best… This is getting bad. We’re dipping into reserves now. We’re going to have to let staff go. We’re going to have to stop some of our initiatives.”

(22:54):

And so you’ve experienced that on both sides. When you talk about that fear or getting that stuff out on the table of we’re doing certain things well, but we’re doing other important things not so well. And that should not be a direct reflection on the executive director or the CEO of the organization because they’re typically implementing the policies at the board’s setting, right? So how do you do that? How do you begin to bring that up to let not only the executive committee, if you will, but the whole board itself to say, “Guys, there’s some gaps here and if we don’t fix this, there’s a lot of competition, that we could lose members and never see them back again, and then we lose relevancy as an organization.”

(23:43):

How do you begin that in your board meetings or even your board prep? Do you say, “These are the things we got to talk about?”

Artesha Moore, FASAE, CAE (23:51):

I tend to be verbose. So first, everything needs to be on the table, period. At this juncture, I came into a situation where I was taking over from an interim who had been here for 18 months. So they had done a lot of the assessment work, looking at the gap, trying to prepare for a new CEO, doing a wide search, understanding it. The conversations that we have though now, because I’m three years in, so I’m at this beautiful part in time where the board that hired me that’s like, “She was saving us,” they gone. Child, they are gone. They don’t give a damn. So the new board is like, “What are you doing about this?” So you have to really look at what I call fears, that false evidence appearing real. Is it real? Harvard Business Review, did a piece, I think it was 2017, maybe 2015, and it was a video series and it was called the Five Whys, and I will do that right now even at home.

(25:00):

And my husband, who’s a chef, he hates it. He hates it so much. Why is this important? Well, why does that matter? Well, why does that matter? Well, why does that matter? Well, that doesn’t make sense to me. So why does that matter? By the time we get to the fifth, I’ve gone to 10 with my team, with the board, with others. When we get down to the bottom of it, a lot of it is what you thought you knew but didn’t know, what you heard from somebody else that wasn’t there.

(25:28):

Or this other piece. I’ve always wanted us to do it this way. Why does that matter? Why does that matter? Why does that matter? Well, if we get down to something that’s tangible that we can do something about, then do it. So for the board here, looking at the things, I came into a situation where they had an assessment, but I did do, like most leaders, I did a listening tour. And so their assessment was really lofty in comparison to our brand reputation, partners, members, others. It was viewed as, not always, but it was viewed as a place where my CEO went. And maybe if my CEO allowed you to come, then you could come.

(26:17):

But since I worked my way up from clerk, I was a clerk. And so for anybody on this call that is young and don’t know, I used to have a Dictaphone and a Dictaphone is a recorder with a bike pedal, like a pedal, and my boss was a lawyer, and she would talk in these headphones and scream at her kids like, “Get off of that. Artesha letter, blah, blah.” And every morning she would put these little tapes on my desk and I just type these letters up. That’s what I did. I worked my way up to every level, clerk, receptionist, manager, director, all the way up to CEO. So if we didn’t change who was in the room of our learning, if we didn’t change how we really invested in them, how would more Arteshas happen? If somebody didn’t say, “Oh, well, you’re smart and you can code. Maybe you should be our database manager,” I didn’t even know what that was.

(27:12):

So I think that we need to be able to say the thing. I think that there’s a lot of getting to the root of what the fear is. And then after my listening tour, I was able to say, lovingly, here’s what the world says right now about our industry, and here’s what our members are saying and partners are saying about us. What do we want to do about it? And thank goodness the board said, “We’re hearing it. We listened. Let’s roll up our sleeves and let’s do it.”

(27:44):

We don’t have a strategic board. We have a working board. They make phone calls, they get on the various things. They serve on the committees, they do the work too. So that’s how we can have a small staff of eight.

Bill Sheehan (27:56):

Next time on Learning by Association. This is where we got to go, and this is what you’re paying me to do and me and my staff to do.

Artesha Moore, FASAE, CAE (28:05):

It really is how do I position my organization to sell something that’s so sticky that anybody would want to buy it and stop competing with the old and your next alphabet.

Bill Sheehan (28:21):

You’ve been listening to Learning by Association, a podcast where we delve into the ever evolving world of associations and the challenges they face in navigating the currents of change.

(28:31):

This episode was produced by D2L, a global learning innovation company, helping organizations reshape the future of education and work. To learn more about our solutions, please visit www.d2l.com. And don’t forget to subscribe so you can stay up to date with new episodes. Thanks for joining us, and we’ll see you next time.