About
We are passionate about helping organizations move to a next phase of growth and innovation by connecting them with their customers—members, stakeholders, clients, patients and others—on the level that most matters and generates the greatest value.
Services & Projects
In place of conventional, product-centered approaches, we focus on your relationships with your various stakeholders and help you eliminate obstacles to your ability to get, engage, retain and become indispensable to them.
New: Member -Centric Staff Development
Get your staff, board or partners on the same page with each other and with your members/customers through our member/customer connection accelerators.
New: Design Thinking for CEOs
Join peers in an intensive boot camp environment and use Design Thinking tools to re-orient your organization from products to members/customers; and from silos to collaborative teams and lead to a next phase of growth.
Approach
To get to different results, you have to change the way you get there, starting with the questions you ask, the tools you use and the conversations you have.
Resources: Tools & Ideas you can Apply
Begin a larger change process immediately by applying our tools, cases, exercises and methodologies to small areas of your daily business.
Leaders’ Interviews: Breaking with Orthodoxies
Get inside the head of innovative leaders who challenged some of the most fundamental pieces of the association model to achieve succss
New Book: People-Centered Framework for Leadership
Six transformational pivots in culture, decision-making, relationships, measures of success and leadership mode that you can leverage to turn your organization around
“In an era where business keeps moving faster, it is no small wonder that resilience has become the new must-have executive skill”...
A new white paper in Elizabeth Weaver Engel’s series, co-authored by Elizabeth and Sherry Marts, looks at the issues of diversity ...
Have you noticed that in framing the problems facing us, most of us are already formulating a solution? Design Thinking tools and ...
Develop a team of entrepreneurial leaders in your organization who can feel like co-owners and think like your members/customers s...
Empathy is an emerging business attribute in this era, allowing you to make authentic connections and personalize customer/member experiences
It is not enough to congregate people on a shared online platform. The more you help them use the platform and the relationships a...
For most nonprofits growth and, in fact, survival is equated to an unceasing struggle for more resources —revenue, staff, members ...
Developing staff and cultures is not a matter of imparting information or instituting special “activities.” They are the outcomes...
Most of us “play it by ear” when it comes to the execution of a new concept. Our focus is on acquiring ideas or information—planni...
Startling as the recent presidential election results were, they would not surprise Design Thinking followers. In many ways, they ...
Planning for the future.
Replace the conventional strategic planning of previous eras with collaborative team “learning by doing;” direct contact with the market, testing and adapting through customer feedback.
Engagement & Retention
Boost engagement and retention by assessing current levels of engagement on the basis of value perceived and mapping specific paths for continuous customer development, tailored to your various subgroups.
The Case of Sermo: Leveraging Communities Within Communities
Article by Anna Caraveli How a physicians
White Paper-- Leading Engagement from the Outside-In
Anna Caraveli and Elizabeth Engel propose an entirely new definition and framework for engagement, and analyze important cases.
The Future of Membership: Collaborative Communities of Shared Purpose
The future of membership and service delivery is in interactive, value-generating communities. Assess how to best leverage relationships among customer or member groups to form value-generating communities that replace passive, one-way service models and increase your options for engaging, growing and generating profit.
Case: A Story of CEO-Led Transformation
How do you turn around an association in a precipitous state of decline? Consider the story of the Metals Service Center Institute, whose CEO relentlessly refocused the organization