Signature May/June 2015 - 18

THESE ARE JUST 3 OF 23
Maximum impact. Storms. Callsto-action.
Meehan Hurwitz is comfortable speaking boldly about prioritizing association communication. So it
should come as no surprise her choice
of company is equally impressive. When
asked who she would want to have lunch
with, if she could choose anyone in the
world, she said simply - Pope Francis. "I
would love to dine with Pope Francis. He
is a visionary leader and communicator.
And, the pope has more than 9 million
followers on Twitter. He launched his
Instagram account in March and gained
1 million followers in less than 12 hours."

June 28 @ 10:30-11:30 am

HYPER-LOCAL CONTENT,
COOL MAG, BUZZY NEWS:
GIVE THE PEOPLE WHAT
THEY WANT
Kate Chandler, digital content director,
National Federation of Independent
Business
Kate Chandler is unapologetic about it
- print is not dead.
She is far from
the only person
saying that the
persistent rumors
of print's demise
are greatly exaggerated. Still it seems
little strange to hear
CHANDLER
from someone with
a background in journalism, especially
when most of her more than 10 years in
that industry are on the digital side.
"Print is important. Associations
are finding that out again," she says.

THE POINT:
Learn how to let members
decide how, when, and
where they want content

Check out the complete
line-up of conference sessions
in the brochure polybagged with
this issue or online at
www.amp16.org.

"Granted, you don't want to hang your
hat on it, but it's an important part of a
larger plan. Print is a vital part of - but
just not the backbone of - media."
She would know. As digital content
director for NFIB, she is getting rave
reviews for the way the association is
highlighting print with its annual publication. "We decided that if we're only going
to do one publication a year, we need
to make it awesome," she says. "There
is a lot of value in a high-quality print
product."
Understandably, she gets a little excited
talking about the perfect-bound, heavystock book full of in-depth articles and
hand-drawn illustrations. But, she's quick
to stress that content strategy around it is
as much a selling point. "We have some
timely content, and we have some evergreen content. It's the kind of content
people go back to several times as a go-to,
engaging resource. You just want to have
it on your desk," she says.

"We also have an email component
twice a month with the same content
strategy as the annual. There is new
content published constantly to our
website. We still do postcards as touchpoints. About one-third of our members
don't have email, or don't want to share it
with us. Many of them still want faxes."
And this is where the multichannel
approach really shines. "Do we do marketing on Snapchat? No. Our members
aren't there," she says. "We could. We
might. It's cheap. It's easy. But we won't
see big returns. If we're going to do something, we are going to do it right."
Doing it right means going where the
audience is. She admits that it's tempting
to be swayed by some of the seemingly
cost-saving approaches to creating content
and waiting for people to come to that
platform. "If you wait for them to come to
you, you'll be doing just that - waiting,"
she says. "This is about how we figured
out how people wanted to be communicated with and did that. We wanted to
show that NFIB is on top of the issues. It
is important to be out there, to be where
the conversation is, discussing it in the
right channels and then showing people
what value we can offer. Whether we're
talking to members, nonmembers, future
members, journalists, etc, we want to make
sure we're in the conversation."

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District Creative
Printing
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Ovid Bell Press
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Signature May/June 2015