Content marketing at its core is educational. It’s about raising awareness not only of a brand but of that brand’s ability to help and to act as a partner. For many learning businesses, content marketing is the start of the learner journey and the way they establish both expertise and trust with prospective learners.
Deirdre Reid is a writer, a content marketer, and the publisher of Association Brain Food, a weekly list of free Webinars and other events and recommended reading. In this episode, number 437, Deirdre talks with Leading Learning Podcast co-host Celisa Steele about content marketing, AI’s influence on marketing, data analytics, the role of taxonomy in personalization, search engine optimization, customer acquisition and retention, partnering with employers, cohort-based learning, unconferences, and self-assessments as marketing tools.
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Deirdre Reid: [00:00:00] We all need to learn more. It never ends. And sometimes you have to make people aware of that.
Celisa Steele: [00:00:10] I’m Celisa Steele.
Jeff Cobb: [00:00:12] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.
Jeff Cobb: [00:00:21] Content marketing at its core is educational. It’s about raising awareness not only of a brand but of that brand’s ability to help and to act as a partner. For many learning businesses, content marketing is the start of the learner journey and the way they establish both expertise and trust with prospective learners.
Jeff Cobb: [00:00:39] Our guest for this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 437, understands the important role that content marketing plays. Having worked in associations for a decade, Deirdre Reid started a writing business about 15 years ago. She now works primarily with association industry partners, and her goal is to help people through her writing. Deirdre also publishes Association Brain Food, a very popular weekly list of free Webinars and other events and recommended reading for association professionals.
Jeff Cobb: [00:01:12] Deirdre and Celisa talk about content marketing, AI’s influence on marketing, data analytics, the role of taxonomy in personalization, search engine optimization, learner journeys, customer acquisition and retention, workforce development and partnering with employers, cohort-based learning, unconferences, self-assessments as marketing tools, and more. Celisa and Deirdre spoke in October 2024.
What Content Marketing Is
Celisa Steele: [00:01:44] I’m curious to get your thoughts about what trends you’re seeing in content marketing, particularly as it relates to learning businesses, and I want to hear about those trends. And then I also have a follow-up question about those trends, which is about how those trends might shape the future of continuing education and professional development and learning in general.
Deirdre Reid: [00:02:07] Content marketing, you and I throw around that term a lot because we do it. You do it. Here’s an example. Let’s talk about the way Tagoras does it. This podcast is content marketing. Your blog is content marketing. The executive summaries and guides and benchmark reports and trends reports that you do is content marketing. Basically, it’s all educational content, but the mission behind it—knowing you and Jeff and knowing a lot of my clients—when you know something, you like to share it. You like to help other people. But it’s marketing. It’s positioning a company so that they can, first of all, spread awareness about their brand, spread awareness about their expertise but also position themselves as a partner—a true partner that is there to help their clients or help their audience. In my case, they’re readers. We try to demonstrate that we understand what our readers are going through on their job. I used to be in those shoes. What is an association professional? What challenges are they dealing with? What ideas are they noodling around?
Deirdre Reid: [00:03:21] Our content is to help them do their jobs better and expose them to new ideas, to explain to the new folks some real basics about what you need to do to recruit members or communicate with your chapters, simple things like that. We do it through blog posts. We do it through case studies, which are a little bit more focused on, in my case, one particular association and how they use the technology. But, through those success stories, you cannot just learn about the product but learn a little bit about how other people are tackling the same issues. Content marketing works. It drives e-mail opens and clicks, and it ideally turns Web site visitors into regular readers, into warm leads, and one day into customers or clients. That’s just so everyone understands what content marketing is and the advantages it has for everybody involved. It’s not just a promotional tool. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be doing it because I like to have a mission in my life, and part of that is to help other people do their jobs better.
Trends in Content Marketing
Deirdre Reid: [00:04:29] Trends. It’s hard to talk about trends without bringing up AI, which, as a writer, I have very mixed feelings about. When it came out, it was November 2022—I’m taking a guess there—that was ChatGPT, the first generative AI tool that people were writing jokes with, and it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I wrote blog posts about it for my clients when it was first released. I had to explore it and figure out what it meant to me and my business. Frankly, right now, after a year and a half, I’m like, “It has its uses, but the human brain is certainly a lot more advanced these days.” I do worry about a reliance on it by marketers. I work with marketing teams—and they never have enough time, so I understand how AI does help them jumpstart a lot of processes, thinking about ideas and outlines, titles, these different things you need to do for Google, like meta tags and such—but I do worry about them relying on it too much and weakening their own creative and cognitive abilities by farming it out to AI. I don’t know if anyone’s ever seen the movie WALL-E; it’s an animated film, and there’s one scene of them all going around on a conveyor belt being stuffed full of junk food.
Deirdre Reid: [00:05:51] Somehow my mind goes from where we are with AI to that very quickly, which is a little too pessimistic. But AI has its uses, and I definitely understand that. I’m not an anti-AI person. I think marketers can use it to help them with jumpstarting, copying, and with videos—creating things that they don’t have the technical chops for. AI is definitely helpful there. You just need to know its limits and not trust it because it does hallucinate, as everyone says. I had it once write a bio for me, and I had written books, which I didn’t realize, so you really have to check. Right now, I say it’s nowhere near a quality of writer who has the subject matter expertise and knows her audience. You have to know when to outsource to a real person and when to rely on AI. It’s exciting, but be careful. Several years ago, it wasn’t so long ago where data and data analytics seemed like something that belonged to other people, techie people, and people with those crazy, analytical minds. Marketers tend to be better with words and people. I don’t know how. Right brain, left brain—I always forget which is which.
Deirdre Reid: [00:07:10] But now, because of the tools that we have, especially these middleware tools, integration, platforms as a service, marketers can really finagle data that’s coming their way. And that could be a member profile/customer profile data; it could be learner data; it could be behavioral data (such as clicks, opens, and page visits), even transactional data (what people have bought). Using all of that, you can start getting more relevant and more targeted in your e-mails and other communication vehicles. And, if you’re not doing that, the technology is there, and it’s just a matter of making the choices of where to allocate resources and investing in some of this stuff, which is getting cheaper all the time. Personalization, smart marketing, only sending people relevant content used to be a trend, but now I think it’s foundational. So the investment does need to be there, and that’s a matter of educating boards perhaps or even your bosses and executive suites.
Deirdre Reid: [00:08:23] Another big piece that’s foundational but will help with the personalization piece is taxonomy, which you see a lot of content strategists talk about. It’s not simple. It’s a big job. But, if you start doing it as you’re going along, tagging your content is what it’s about because then, when you have that, they become pieces of data basically, and you can start delivering a more personalized experience to not only your e-mail readers but your Web site visitors. In your newsletters, you could tag it by topic or career stage, and that way you can take all the content you have, those session recordings, get AI to rip apart recordings by different topics, and start having little microlearning, little bites of content that you can send out as content marketing—something free to get them interested and perk their interest to maybe pay for something later. That’s maybe not so much a trend, but you don’t really see it very much.
Deirdre Reid: [00:09:26] One other thing that comes to mind is understanding the place of SEO in your content marketing strategy, and I see this a lot with clients who work with agencies. Associations often do the same thing, where they’re instructed to write blog posts using this particular SEO phrase and this keyword and following this outline, and it looks all AI-driven to me. The thing is, Google algorithms have changed a lot over the years, and, if you’re writing for your audience, if you understand what they really need, write to that. Don’t be a slave to SEO. The keyword strategy doesn’t nearly have the same power it used to. Google’s gotten smarter, and, if you write useful content, Google will like what you’re doing. So be a little discriminating in how you write. Write like a human. Don’t write for the Web-crawling little robots from Google. Those are just some of the things that I come across.
Deirdre Reid: [00:10:32] In my world or the association world often we sadly are playing some years behind the for-profit world. A lot of times what’s a trend in the association world may have been common sense in the for-profit world. Not always. It’s a matter of resources, and it’s also a matter of our governance structure when we’re run by boards of volunteer members/volunteer leaders who often take a chance and take risks in their business but don’t always want to take those same chances when they sit on the board because they have a legacy to preserve, and they don’t want to be that board that lost the money going down that path. We have a lot of really innovative, intelligent, generous people in our community who know what’s going on and are on the cutting edge of everything, but yet they can’t always act on it in their organizations. It’s a funny place. It must be a very frustrating place to be sometimes.
Partner with Tagoras
Jeff Cobb: [00:11:32] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.
The Role of Content Marketing in Customer Acquisition and Retention
Celisa Steele: [00:12:07] A couple of things occurred to me, hearing you talk. One is around the purpose of content marketing. You talked about it providing value in and of itself, but it does also have this purpose of hopefully taking that, say, blog reader and turning that into someone who might purchase a course or engage in some sort of learning experience. But then it also occurred to me that content marketing has a role in customer retention too; it’s not just the acquisition. If you’re providing this value so that learner who came and participated in one of your Webinars or went to your conference, and then, if they’re going to the blog, and they’re seeing relevant content, that might remind them, “Oh yes, this organization has great content. I should look to them for my next learning experience, the next course I want to take.” Any comments about customer acquisition versus customer retention when you’re thinking about content marketing, maybe for some of the clients that you’re working with?
Deirdre Reid: [00:13:03] I’m glad you brought that up because, yes, the customer journey, the member journey, they’re very similar as far as when I was speaking about boards always love the growth numbers. They love seeing the reports from the membership director showing the number of members growing and showing the recruitment growing. But what about retention? It’s huge, whether you’re talking about a learner, a customer, or a member. That’s the beauty of content marketing. If you can establish that relationship, you are hitting them with ideally new content every week, every other week, whether it’s a podcast episode, a blog post, or a Webinar. I always think you have to keep delighting your customers. There’s so much competition, and it’s not just competition—“Oh, they might go take a class at another organization.” In a lot of fields, especially medical fields and legal fields, there is so much competition with other for-profit and nonprofit organizations, but it’s not just that. It’s competition for their time and their bandwidth. Those challenges that all marketers face, and associations face with their members, even to get them to read their e-mail, newsletter, and not just let it sit in their inbox.
Deirdre Reid: [00:14:21] I think members are ever-changing. Learners are ever-changing. I think reaching out to them and learning more about them, letting them know that you’re not just pushing promos—”We’ve got this Webinar coming up; we’ve got this,” all these paid things. You already paid dues. “We want you to keep giving us more money.” But it’s also finding out more about how their interests and needs are changing because we know that they are. Let’s look at AI and how many of us have had to figure out how to do that quickly. There are so many ways that, in different professions, because of technology, changing workforce, or changing marketplace, new needs are coming up all the time. So sending them a poll, sending them a little interest inventory when they renew their membership, on a year anniversary. Or six months later, after their learning experience, following up with them with an automated e-mail asking them about the impact of that. I don’t know how many associations do that. “What we taught you, did it work? Are you actually applying those new skills?”
Deirdre Reid: [00:15:32] Anytime you engage and ask questions to find out what somebody thinks is a sign of interest, which a lot of organizations (for-profit or nonprofit) don’t ever do. Once they get your money, it’s like, “Okay, thank you. Goodbye.” There’s a new conversational engagement tool in our market, which is a fairly new concept, but it is little e-mail questions, and you respond. It’s automated, AI-driven smart technology, and, depending on what your answer is, it will send you another e-mail letting you know about something. That’s something that never was possible. AI and automation are making what was once impossible for a small team possible so that there are ways to actually touch your members and your learners but not have to do it manually. And people are used to that. They don’t care as long as the intent is good, and you’re giving value to them in response. Yes, I think a content marketing program where you’re always telling people the what and the why about something for free—whether it’s a free Webinar for members, a blog post, or free little videos that you send out—give them a taste, and, if they want to dig deeper, then they pay for something. That’s the way an association and a learning program can certainly keep people going.
Deirdre Reid: [00:17:00] Or self-assessments. Remember way back when, on Facebook, everybody was taking quizzes about God knows what? It was a great way for scammers to learn all your personal things that you might have in your security questions. But self-assessments are fun. We all like to know how much we know. We like to see how we compare to others. Self-assessments, put them on your LMS, and send them out to people to see. “How much do you really know about this issue? How much do you really know about this? Or where are your gaps in your skills?” Get people aware. The first step of marketing is awareness. Get people aware of where they could stand to learn a little bit more. A lot of us think we know a lot, especially when you reach a certain level. That’s kind of a cliché, the CEOs who don’t need to take classes anymore. But we all need to learn more. It never ends. And sometimes you have to make people aware of that. Self-assessments can do that.
Using Technology to Improve Communications and Engagement
Celisa Steele: [00:17:59] Deirdre, we’ve been hearing a lot about technology in some of what you’ve already shared today, and we know that technology is playing an increasingly important role in how organizations engage with their audiences. I’d be curious to get some additional thoughts from you on how you’re seeing associations and other learning businesses leveraging technology to improve communications and engagement with their members, their learners, their customers.
Deirdre Reid: [00:18:28] When you said other businesses, something just occurred to me that’s been one of my soapbox topics. When I write blog posts, especially for my LMS client, I tend to find myself pushing the same ideas years after years. One of the great things about COVID was that it did make people look beyond what they’ve always done, including virtual learning, which I love. As someone who does not live in the Washington, DC or Chicago area, where most association activities take place, I personally enjoy the fact that I got access to education, whether it be roundtables and discussions or virtual conferences. And I’ve seen for-profits take that and run the idea of membership communities for people who are in the same stage of their career or business development. I particularly saw a lot for folks who were doing startup businesses or marketers, and cohort programs are huge in the for-profit world and hugely successful and big revenue generators for the kind of programs you apply for. You pay a little bit more money, but what happens is you learn with a facilitator, instructor, or coach, and it varies.
Deirdre Reid: [00:19:45] Seth Godin is involved in one called the altMBA that has gone on for years and is still a really popular and expensive program. The idea is that you do have the content, which is important, but we also have the community, and we know the reason people join associations, even the introverts, it’s not only to get information and news, but it’s primarily…. MGI is a membership consulting company in our space, and they’ve done a membership benchmarking report every year for like a dozen years. The two top reasons, year after year after year, are education and networking. And networking is really finding your community and finding people who do what you do, who get what you do, who you can talk shop with. Cohort programs are the upper level of that as far as time commitment. They last several months, if not a year, but you can do it at the lower level. What about a two-month, three-month program for a group of people? They don’t pay as much as perhaps these big, expensive programs. But you have coach facilitators. Maybe they’re paid coaches with expertise. Maybe they’re volunteers. Maybe this is a new volunteer category you have in your association.
Deirdre Reid: [00:21:03] But, where you have helped people at the same career stage, interest in the same things, learning together, learning from each other, holding each other accountable, lifelong relationships develop. I truly believe that that is a life-transforming experience. Something similar happens at ASAE with their DELP program, which stands for Diversity Executive Leadership Program—a yearlong program, application-based, big, huge sponsorship by Visit Detroit that subsidizes a lot of the travel and such for the people who are involved. I know so many people who have graduated from that program, and it changes their life. The people who were in that several years ago are in CEO positions now all over our industry.
Deirdre Reid: [00:21:55] So you take something like DELP, and you figure out, “What are the secret, magic ingredients, and how can we bring that to our association?” I don’t think enough associations do something like this. Or, if they do, it’s the traditional leadership academy, which is fine, but maybe it’s time to rethink what you’re doing. Put more virtual so it’s a blended learning experience. People don’t have the money or the time to travel as much as they used to—maybe they do have the same amount, but the perception is they don’t. And do something that’s more accessible to more people—people who physically can’t travel, for financial reasons can’t, personal/family reasons, employer reasons—and get them together online, and find a sponsor to help you bring them together once or twice a year so they get that irreplaceable in-person experience.
Time: A Common Marketing Challenges
Celisa Steele: [00:22:56] What are some of the biggest challenges that you’ve seen learning businesses face when they’re thinking about how to effectively market those education programs and services? And then hopefully also you have some thoughts on not just the challenges but ways to overcome those challenges.
Deirdre Reid: [00:23:12] The time challenge is, number one, your members’ time, your customers’ time, and proving that it’s worth the time to open your e-mail. And you’ve got to prove it by demonstrating that it is. That’s what we’ve discussed before about personalization, understanding and using data as your friend, smart content marketing, and becoming that trusted source. So when your e-mail or your newsletter pops up in their inbox, they know that it’s going to be valuable. It’s not going to take them forever to read, or it’s going to be a quick skim. Skimming is fine. Skim, and then find what’s important to you. That’s a challenge that content marketing can help solve by helping you become a trusted source. Another thing is, if you ask somebody, “What’s the role of professional development? Do you think professional development is important?,” any professional is going to say, “Of course. Of course it is.” But then ask them when was the last time they paid for any professional development? And you might find there’s a gap between what we think we want and what we actually pay for. And yes, I’m guilty as charged. I love my free education, but…
Celisa Steele: [00:24:25] Association Brain Food—that’s the premise there.
Deirdre Reid: [00:24:27] Yes, right. But every now and then, I do pay for things, like the Learning Business Summit, which I attended earlier this year, which was really good. I have to say it was worth it all. I think there’s also a big marketing job in creating an audience of warm leads. Yes, your membership is, in theory, your audience, but what you need to do is take them from being people who say they want to learn to people who actually do it. Of course fear would be a great way to do that, but it’s not the best motivator. They need to know that that’s the only way they’re going to get ahead. Inspiring them by better pictures on themselves, using marketing and figuring out their aspirations, and trying to connect them, but making it easy for them to take the baby steps. An eight-week online course that meets once a week and has homework may not be the best way for someone to start learning. Maybe you have to put them on a learner’s journey and start them with small little videos and microlearning and then build them up to even an hour.
Deirdre Reid: [00:25:33] A lot of people say they can’t take an hour out of the day for a Webinar. All right. Try some 20-minute Webinars, and see. Test, experiment, try with different segments, and see what works for them. But have something for everybody, for not just every budget but for every time commitment tolerance so that way you can get their feet wet. They understand that “Boy, this is actually something I enjoy. Maybe I will start going to a Webinar every other week or so. Or maybe I will do this.” It’s like volunteering. You can’t ask someone to be on your board. You have to start small with micro-volunteering and pull them along the volunteer journey. It would be the same thing with a learner journey as well. So that is one challenge I see out there.
Understanding the Competition
Deirdre Reid: [00:26:21] Understanding the competition is always a challenge, and it’s getting worse because for-profits have discovered that there’s a really good business in lifelong learning. And it’s evergreen. There are new customers coming along and graduating every day. Associations, we always thought of ourselves as like, “We’re the authority. We’re the industry leader.” But that’s not enough anymore. And loyalty—maybe your boomers and your Gen X are loyal, but I’m not sure about the rest. Understanding what your differentiators are compared to your competitors, once you start exploring that, you may discover you don’t have any. That’s where you’ve got to figure out, okay, well, what can you do? What is your secret sauce? Is it your community that you can offer? What about you is going to set you apart from your for-profit competitors because they probably have deeper marketing pockets than you do? If you can figure that out, you’ll be able to take on the nonprofit.
Workforce Development and Partnerships with Employers
Deirdre Reid: [00:27:30] I wrote about this a while back, on workforce development. I saw an awesome example of a workforce development site. I forget the name of the association, but they are a semiconductor chips organization. The challenge that associations always have is the younger generations and workforce development—working with employers to figure out what together you can do to attract young people to your industry. That’s something I’m not sure I see enough associations doing. The nursing industry does it. The chips people are doing it. And they have Web sites that are dedicated to this, that have interviews with members about why they got into it, what are different career paths, how many different directions can you go, information about education, information about typical young professional career issues—things like resumes, dressing for work, and all the things adults take for granted. You could call these adulting issues they address. But I think that workforce development is becoming more and more an issue for many industries, and young people are floundering. I have a nephew who’s in his 20s, a smart kid, not really sure which way he wants to go. I’ve tried to point him in the direction of associations, but, where he lives, there aren’t too many.
Deirdre Reid: [00:28:53] Associations can help a lot of folks figure out, “Here, come check us out. Here’s a direction you can go in all these different ways.” Be a little more proactive about reaching out to young people where they are—probably on social media channels—and reaching out to them with people who are a few years ahead of them, five years ahead, and peers helping younger peers figure out their direction. That, I think, is a challenge that everyone’s wrestling with, and education and community would also work just as well for young people as it does for their older generations. One thing I brought up working with employers—employer advisory councils are a great idea, not just for helping to develop workforce development programs but to develop any kind of learning program. We need to educate folks.
Deirdre Reid: [00:29:46] The employers are the ones who know what skills are in demand. The employers and their HR departments or industry recruiters—all these folks know what skills are needed, where the skills gaps are in the industry or in companies, and partnering and working hand in hand with these employers through an advisory council that can help you design curriculum and help you figure out what it is exactly you need to do in the next few years, which programs you need to develop. You also get a lot of buy-in too, and then we all know people need to have the employer support to pay for any programs. It’s like a technology project. If you get people involved from the start, when it’s time to adopt the technology, they’re going to be more willing. The same thing will happen with these employers. If you get them involved in your curriculum design, they’re going to be more willing to pay for the results than if they’re locked outside of it when these programs are presented to them. So that might help with that young professional challenge and curriculum challenge in general.
Unconferences and Peer Learning
Celisa Steele: [00:31:00] You’ve worked with a lot of different organizations on a lot of different projects over your career. Do you have a favorite project or initiative that you could share that involves learning, and what made it particularly impactful or meaningful to you when you reflect back on it?
Deirdre Reid: [00:31:17] One that comes to mind is when I worked for the California Building Industry Association; it’s the state affiliate of the National Association of Home Builders, where I had worked for five years, then was hired away by CBIA in Sacramento. Every year we put on an annual membership summit for our local membership staff. We had 20+ local home builders associations, and so the local membership staff and their membership committee chairs, vice chairs, would come to this. The first year, we hired somebody who was a big membership expert guru guy. He came and facilitated, and it was your typical membership conference. The second year, the same guy called me the morning of the conference, in my hotel room, to tell me that he woke up with a stomach flu. I thought, “Okay, well….”
Deirdre Reid: [00:32:11] One of my colleagues from NAHB worked at our Southern California local, so I called her up. We got together. We figured out what we were going to do. We had the program, so we knew what we wanted to cover as far as basic topics, and we decided to let all of our local membership staff—they’re a very opinionated, smart bunch—we decided we would tap into them, and we did it unconference style and asked them to help us design the program together. They loved that idea. And Alison and I facilitated it and shared a lot of our expertise because we had a lot of expertise to share. We had lots of stories from other associations in the NAHB network from across the country, but we also made sure that we got everyone into small groups to do a lot of interaction. It was a lot of group conversations and small-group conversations.
Deirdre Reid: [00:33:07] By the middle of the day, that room was buzzing. By the end of the day, people were telling us it was the best thing they had experienced as far as education in their career. We felt pretty good about it, and it was basically because they helped design it. We didn’t assume what they needed to know. They just talked, and the relationships were developing like they hadn’t in years. Future years, we did that format over and over. It saved us a lot of money on speakers and travel expenses, but it was a really rewarding thing to put together, which we did with no instructional design expertise whatsoever. We followed our gut, and it worked well. So I still look back on that very fondly.
Celisa Steele: [00:33:55] I like how that example exhibits perfectly what you talked about, the main two reasons that people tend to say they join an association: for education and for peer networking.
Deirdre Reid: [00:34:06] Right. That’s one thing over my career—this started when I worked at NAHB—is to see relationships start. I remember back, some of my members on my committees at NAHB, these women, still to this day, I see them on Facebook, going on trips together, enjoying each other’s company when they get together. I think that is one of the magics of association, that it is truly, can truly be life-transforming, which sounds very grand and such, but I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it in my own life, and I certainly saw it in my members’ lives before it even happened to me. It’s something I think we forget. And figuring out how to capture that and put that in marketing messaging to even your members who already belong because they still need to be sold on the power of membership. Maybe they haven’t experienced it themselves, so the secret is trying to figure out how to connect them with that transformational experience.
Personal Approach to Lifelong Learning
Celisa Steele: [00:35:01] This is a question that we always like to ask our guests on the Leading Learning Podcast, and it’s about your own practices, habits, and approaches, maybe sources that you use for your own personal lifelong learning.
Deirdre Reid: [00:35:14] I’m lucky because I work for myself, and the whole day is at my disposal, however I want to use it. I read all the time. I read about associations. I read about the world at large. I read about technology. I read about organizational development. I just read. I get hundreds of newsletters; it’s pretty ridiculous. But I read all the time. A part of it is for my own professional development, but also I do share things I like in Association Brain Food. I practice what I preach. And I mentioned how associations are transformational. For me, it started with blogs. Back in 2008, 2009, I started reading association blogs by people who I’m still friends with to this day. That was when bloggers actually commented on each other’s blogs. I became friends with all these people who belonged to ASAE as well. We were all on Twitter back then too, which of course has changed. But blogging changed my life, which sounds strange, but it is true because it introduced me to new ideas and new people and inspired me in my work, and I still feel that was my foray into professional development.
Deirdre Reid: [00:36:25] I feel like professional development like that, on your own, can still change your life. Newsletters, blogs, books—I always have a lot of books going, never work-related. I’m not one for business books. I like to read fiction, history, philosophy, and all kinds of strange things. I have a long queue of my podcast episodes. I listen to them at 1.5 speed so that I can get through more of them. I do listen to association podcasts. There are a lot of good podcasts in our space, like this one, but there are many others. I especially like hearing ones that have association guests on because that’s my intel, besides hearing them on Webinars and talking to them in person. And I go to conferences. I mentioned the Learning Business Summit I went to earlier. I like to go to ASAE Annual. I used to go to digitalNow a lot. I’ll probably return to that in the future. But I try to get my professional development in lots of different ways. I never stopped reading. I think that’s the most important thing. And, if you read a lot, you certainly become a better writer too. If anyone’s wondering how to improve their writing chops, read good stuff, not AI-written.
Jeff Cobb: [00:37:45] Deirdre Reid is a freelance writer and content marketer and publisher of Association Brain Food, a weekly list of free Webinars and other events and recommended reading for association professionals.
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