Artificial intelligence is everywhere you turn these days—and it’s not the stuff of science fiction anymore. Traditional businesses and organizations are increasingly turning to AI to fuel their daily operations. Workplace processes are being transformed by AI innovations. AI is fuelling growth and by 2030 it is expected to contribute up to $15.7 billion to the global economy.
Clearly, the impact of AI is enormous—and it’s growing.
But this impact isn’t limited to the world of traditional business. The revolutionary potential of AI can help all kinds of organizations work better—including associations. There’s a brave new world of AI out there just waiting to be harnessed by associations looking to boost member management and engagement.
For associations, AI tools can help with everything from conference management and content creation to member communications and workplace organization. And in this post, we’ll cover five key ways that your association can take advantage of what AI has to offer—and explain how you can boost member engagement in the process. Let’s dive in!
1) Use AI to give your conferences a boost
For many associations, conferences are the bread and butter of member engagement. And by now, we’re all familiar with the ways that tech has reshaped the conference experience: sophisticated conference apps have become the norm; most conference content is accessible online; and purely virtual conferences are becoming more and more common.
But AI is set to revolutionize the conference experience even further—and associations can take advantage of this to fuel member management and engagement.
Take virtual conferences as an example. You can use AI to create a more interactive virtual experience that mimics the engagement your members would find at a traditional conference. Building an AI chatbot for the conference experience, for example, can give attendees at a large and anonymous-feeling virtual conference a personal guide that answers questions and provides support.
AI can also help improve conference programming. You can use AI tools to collect useful data on things like the sessions that members’ are attending, the topics that are attracting the most interest, and audience engagement trends. With this data in hand, you can refine the content of your conferences to make sure that it reflects member interests and priorities. In turn this can help your bottom line: if your conferences cater to the interests of your members, they’re more likely to attend.
2) Improve workplace organization
Association member management always involves a hefty dose of behind-the-scenes work and office logistics. If your team works like a well-oiled machine—if collaboration between teams is seamless, if staff are able to work efficiently, if projects are well managed—connecting with members will always be a smoother, more straightforward task. And AI can be a powerful tool for making that happen.
Recently, we’ve seen an explosion in AI tools targeting workplace organization. As Spoke puts it, AI is set to transform the workplace in the coming years, changing everything from the way companies hire, to the way teams handle mundane admin tasks, to internal communication—significantly improving efficiency and productivity along the way.
For associations, this kind of workplace AI can be a boon for organization and communication.
For example, there are many task tracking AI platforms out there that manage all of your team members’ tasks and timelines, streamlining the work of project managers and cutting out the unpleasant task of chasing people down for overdue work.
There are also AI tools that can promote better workplace communication, by generating automatic responses to common slack messages, automatically providing translations across different languages, or automatically sorting staff into user groups that can help them communicate more efficiently.
3) Upgrade your marketing strategy
A strong marketing strategy is at the heart of association member engagement. If you want to find and attract new members—and keep your existing members engaged—you need to get your name, your mission statement, and your value proposition out there. And over the last few years, AI has revolutionized the way that kind of marketing gets done.
Today, there’s a whole smorgasbord of tools out there that use AI to improve marketing processes and strategy. For example, predictive marketing tools can use AI and big data to generate marketing messages that will resonate with your target audiences.
Then there are the tools that use AI to track existing marketing efforts to see how well they’re performing, then make suggestions for boosting performance. Or, you can take advantage of tools that pinpoint the marketing platforms that can best help you extend the reach and resonance of your marketing messages.
The bottom line is that AI marketing tools can deliver a massive boost to your marketing efforts. And solid marketing efforts will pay dividends in terms of member recruitment, engagement, and retention.
But these tools are also useful for small and mid-sized associations working to deliver their marketing strategy on tight budgets, with short timelines and overstretched teams. If your marketing is under resourced, you can outsource vital tasks—like marketing analytics and strategy—to an AI tool that will free your staff up to focus their time and energy on other important work.
4) Ramp up your content creation
You know by now that content is an incredibly valuable resource for associations (and their members.) Great content boosts member engagement and retention, leads to social sharing, attracts new members, and provides a concrete service that people will return to time and again.
But content creation can be arduous and time consuming. End-to-end, the process of brainstorming, pitching, fleshing out an idea, writing, editing, and preparing a piece of content for publication eats up a huge amount of resources.
That’s where AI comes in.
There are AI tools that help you write faster—think voice-to-text technology that allows you to dictate a blog post or an ebook hands free. There are also AI tools that help you brainstorm the kinds of topics that would resonate with your target audience. And then there are the plethora of AI editing tools out there that scan content for spelling and grammar errors, adjust style and tone-of-voice, and generate suggestions for ways to improve the quality of written content.
Whatever tool you choose, the beauty of using AI in content creation is simple for associations: it can help you generate better content more quickly, giving your members more to engage with and benefit from.
5) Build better chatbots
For associations, member management almost always involves fielding a lot of questions and providing strong member support.
For many associations, chatbots have been the tool of choice for managing this task. And these chatbots are great a providing a baseline level of user support. But going forward, AI is set to shake up the way these bots work. Namely, we’re seeing a rise in more cognitive, conversational forms of AI—that is, AI that’s able to understand human context and nuanced language, to think creatively, and to respond to shifting situations.
That’s good news for associations—especially ones that rely heavily on chatbots to deal with member engagement. With more responsive and cognitive AI making its way into the chatbot universe, you can expect your members to walk away from their interactions with your bot more satisfied. But you can also expect your staff to benefit: with more intelligent AI, you can outsource more of your complex member management tasks, so that staff can work more efficiently.
