Revamping of ACG San Diego Has Lured New, Diverse Members

It started with an innocuous discussion about our tagline: “ACG San Diego: Where Dealmakers Meet.” What followed was an identity crisis that fueled debate. What was ACG San Diego all about? What was our membership mix and how was that tied to the future of our organization? Were we adequately serving the needs of our membership? Luckily, our board took the task very seriously and embarked on a year-long journey of membership surveys, qualitative and quantitative analysis, branding exercises, programming experimentations, and lengthy discussion. What we discovered along the way was quite interesting: We were an organization comprised primarily of service professionals, and secondarily of senior corporate executives. The purpose we served was not as a respected and trusted adviser to CEOs but the resource network that senior, qualified service professionals turned to when they needed to develop their own alliances to serve their CEO clients. Our challenge was how to leverage our value to our maximum benefit. How do you tell two stories to two different audiences and have them both feel as though you provided them value specific to their needs? Our solution was simple: To mix up our monthly breakfast programming and start inviting well-respected CEOs to come and speak. The results were two-fold. Service providers came to get to know the CEOs and senior executives came to learn from the CEOs. It was a win-win. Our annual sponsorship went up, covered our lost monthly breakfast revenue, and attendees no longer felt as though every breakfast was really a pay-to-speak event. Then, we addressed our concept of ACG and our tagline. Why did every breakfast have to be about some aspect of M&A? This was limiting to our audience and did not speak to the core concept of our organization – growth. We began expanding our topics to include both internal and external growth issues such as corporate culture, branding, doing business in China, and surviving the biotech industry, and sharing our stories about large M&A deals to generate further excitement. And guess what? It worked. We began diversifying our audience based on the industry of the CEO’s company. The greater the variety of people that attended the events, the more intriguing it became to prospective members, who recognized and appreciated the value of diversity. Soon, our next challenge presented itself. How do we increase membership and the perceived value of membership? We began by creating a one-time free-pass policy for guests of board members to attend a monthly breakfast. An interesting side effect occurred. Board members began pre-qualifying potential members of ACG, word of mouth advertising and buzz increased, the organization’s perceived value in the community improved, and the conversion rate to membership increased. Simultaneously, we decided to undertake a major brand upgrade. We redesigned our website, converted our print materials to electronic invitations/newsletters, created a consistent look and feel to all of our event materials, and started a public relations campaign. Everywhere ACG San Diego was seen in public and on online, the brand was consistent, which gave the organization greater credibility and elevated the perception of the organization. This year, our annual awards dinner was taken to a whole new level as we sold out, in a larger venue (almost twice the size of the year before). We invited eight heads of middle-market companies to speak and presented them with a Dealmaker of the Year award. It was an amazing demonstration of success and support from the business community and from the CEOs that attended and spoke at our awards event. Since undergoing our major transformation, we have increased our board, created an annual strategic plan for all committee heads, and have begun planning our next conference, which had been put on hold for two years during our membership analysis. We’ve set up a task force committee to once more analyze our tagline and to determine how to attract more senior executives in the future. On January 25, 2007, we will hold our first Annual GrowthTrends Conference. It will be a one-day educational conference that brings together senior corporate executives and top-level experts to discuss the latest internal and external growth solutions, and we will partner with the University of San Diego to host several nationally prominent, exciting speakers. If January is cold and nasty where you are, I hope you will join us in sunny San Diego for a conference that’s guaranteed to transform your business. I look forward to meeting you then. Angela Hill President, ACG San Diego President, Incitrio [email protected] (c) 2006 Mergers and Acquisitions Journal and SourceMedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved. http://www.majournal.com http://www.sourcemedia.com