Association Data Points

Welcome back to Association Data Points, where we discuss associations, data, and the people behind the numbers. I'm Erin Peters here with my co host, Brian Seabacher.

Hello, Erin.

Hey, Brian. How's it going?

Good. Happy New Year.

Happy New Year. We also have with us Catherine Zessman, research designer at Hargrove and Associates. How are you, Catherine?

Good, Erin. Thank you for having me back.

We are looking back and looking ahead today, 2023 into 2024. Really, really exciting stuff in 2023. Let's start with the podcast itself. Brian, tell us more about Association Data Points.

Hey. We we started a podcast last year, and this is, the first time we've gone over into a new year with a podcast. So we learned a lot. I think we we talked to a lot of very interesting people. I think we made a lot of interesting, had great conversations about, what was going on in the in the field.

Learned a ton. I I I don't know about you, Erin.

Oh, so much. And it was great to have the opportunity to attend shows and see what we were hearing, from our guests play playing out in real life and speaking with people, attendees at the shows who were really mirroring back what we were hearing from association leaders in terms of some of the the big topics we've covered here, member engagement, relevance, all great stuff.

Yeah. And, you know, looking at numbers and having that, connection to see where things are going, I'd say, you know, little little behind the scenes thing. Our our numbers are, steady and, we're slowly finding an audience here. So this is very cool. I'm really enjoying putting this together with, with you and, all our guests and looking forward to seeing who what kind of conversations we have this year because this is a pretty exciting year in our field.

Mhmm. Yep. Absolutely. I did a little bit of research and found approximately 82 to 90% of new podcasts do not continue past three episodes.

Just three.

Just three.

That's kinda sad. It's, I I get it. It's a lot of work. Mhmm. And if you don't see the payback immediately, it's I suppose it's like anything.

It's it it's January right now. I bet a lot of people are still going to the health club, but it's, you know, we're we're this is week three. Right? I we're that that excitement of, the first week in the New Year and kicking things off, it gets harder and harder to sustain things on that. So I'm, you know, I'm very very thankful that we have great guests who are showing up and giving us, some really cool things to think about and to share with our audience, which makes that so much easier.

Definitely. And I I with the whole New Year's resolution and gym thing, thing, I feel very seen and maybe a little attacked, but that's okay. That's that'll get me back. That'll get get us going again here.

Well and and I I, wanted to come in with some supporting data around podcasts and American media consumption, and just provide some some context. So according to a recent study, the infinite dial report conducted by Edison Research, in 2013, just 12% of Americans listened to a podcast in the previous month. Wow. And as of 2023, that is up to 42%. So it has increased 30% in the last decade, and there is room to grow.

Fantastic. That's certainly for me, I've I've, like podcasts have been transformational for, you know, how I my my work life and also just how I consume media these days. A lot of people are really finding that now. And it's it's interesting that you would think, like, it's kinda peaked out after ten years, but it's been kind of a slow elevator up. I wonder if they're I wonder wonder what they're seeing if the trend line's gonna continue.

I was kinda curious about that. Brian, do you remember roughly which year you started listening to podcasts?

Oh, it was about 02/2002, '2 thousand '3. So really early adopter. I had to this was when it wasn't necessarily easy to listen to a podcast.

So, like, it it wasn't as convenient as it is today.

But, you know, just the the idea of, it wasn't even called a podcast at the time. I think it was, like, more like an Internet audio talk show.

Oh, that that is grabby. Mhmm.

Yeah. That really gets you. But if you were interested in the topic and a little technically inclined, it was it was a great way to pass the time and learn a ton. And that's Yeah. I think that's that's all still true, but boy, is it a lot more convenient.

Right. And I I love that technically inclined, you know, that that you put that in there. When I asked what year, if you kinda think back, I thought all this is gonna be early. Brian's obviously gonna be an early adopter of this and certainly were. I can't I gosh.

What are we? Twenty twenty three now? So I'm gonna say 2020 maybe is when I listened to my first podcast. The number you cited, Catherine, twenty thirteen is the year my son was born. So I didn't even, like, know my middle name that year.

But, didn't really get into listening to podcasts, until then. And I I like again what you said about the being technologically inclined, the sort of removing some of the the gates or the friction in terms of accessibility. Well, I I think we're gonna talk about this a little later today is, you know, are we working for technology or is the technology working for us? I don't wanna bury the lead too much though. So let's go back to 2023 and talk about some of the highlights and trends more specifically.

We talked about the guests, incredible guests this year.

Amazing.

Yes.

Like, right off the bat, I think these fantastic guests who are, you know, their finger right on the pulse in the middle of everything in this industry.

Yes. And this is one of the things we remark on that we have loved about really being out on the scene this year, with the shows, conferences. Association professionals want to help. They are the first people to raise their hands and say, yeah, let me see who I know or oh, I have an idea about that. So, you know, we had to do some leg work finding guests, but we didn't really have to chase a whole lot.

They were just so willing to give of their time to help us and to help the industry.

I don't know a lot of other industries where it would be that straightforward to get FaceTime and help from someone with, like, a very impressive title. Yes. Like, we have been fortunate enough to have with this show. Mhmm. And, that's, that that's fantastic.

I mean, really, there is a spirit of this this community. This is all about helping and advocating and trying to move things forward for the collective. It's not about the individuals. So being part of that and being able to help here and, like, hopefully hopefully, the audience is finding this show is helping in some small way that, it's not necessary. This is not supposed to be just some big ad.

It's about, you know, kind of presenting ideas and advancing the conversation and moving things forward.

Yeah. Yep. And some of the great conversations we had from 2023 with not only our guests, but, a lot of the people at the the shows that we attended were around member engagement. So that was certainly one of the big trends of 2023. Catherine and I worked at the, at the booths in the, during the shows, and Brian, and our colleague Todd as well.

But, Catherine, I know you and I were talking about how many visitors to the booth talked about member engagement as one of the top issues in their associations. Oh,

almost every single one. Almost every single one. And many of the the topics that were discussed at the meetings or in all in all the sessions, all tied back to member engagement.

If you don't have member engagement, it's, you don't really have a whole lot there. I think, you know, if you're if you're part of a community, if the community communities are changing, it's I think people are have noticed that. They notice the people who are at the meetings are different. Obviously, COVID had a you know, we we talked to a lot of, leaders about the pandemic and how they got through it and what changed afterwards, and the member engagement has evolved with that. Also, I think, you know, the composition of the workforce has changed and what people you know, who is showing up and who finds value in this and how do you, you know, how do you engage those people?

And that's, you know, kind of dovetails into the next point here about relevance. How do you remain relevant to a changing community? I think we we we talk to a lot of people about that and, like, ways that ways that you saw this and the ways that you could measure that this is happening, not just have this gut feeling like, you know, this something's not quite right here or something something's changing. How do we measure those things?

One of the interesting discussion points that came out of that from a couple different association professionals with whom we spoke was this generational idea. And I had not thought of that prior to this. So they said they have these, almost sort of three generations represented. There's upcoming or or people who have entered the workforce for the first time. There's people who have been in the workforce or in the association for some time.

And then there's people who are closer toward retirement, still in the association. And those professionals were almost saying, like, they feel like they have to have three different tactics for engaging with those members.

And then that macro trend of, there's five as many as five or six major generations working in the workforce today as a whole. Like, from all the way from, you know, the, you know, the silent generation baby boomers who are getting near, you know, close closer to retirement age to all the way down to the, you know, Gen Zs and the, gen alpha. I'm I'm not even sure what we're calling them right now. We haven't even agreed on that. But people entering that workforce, you know, we're an incredible diversity of capabilities and comfort levels with certain ideas and technology and, you know, the way that they even just the way that they want to engage in the way that they form community is quite a bit different.

So, you know, big challenge on our hands to get our hands around that and being able to engage those audiences.

One of the things we spoke about at Association Forum and I think our our episode prior to this, we we dove into that a little bit more. So please listen back. But we talked about this incredible surplus of information that's easily accessible, to to a lot of people And, how professionals are going to those places and not necessarily going to their associations as the first place, where they they can get that reliable content. So even dealing with with that kind of just surplus of information of signal breaking through that, we had some some great content there. So we had these great opportunities to be at the ASAE Show, the Association Forum Holiday Showcase, Associations North, and we also were in our backyard with the MINTEC conference as well.

So we saw some trends and highlights throughout. Some of the some of the things like member engagement and relevance have been talking points for quite some time, but we also saw this theme of disruption.

Disruption in the form of, many things, particularly technology at this moment. I think, hard to hide the excitement and intrigue around the topic of AI right now. It's, the this one is fascinating to me. I find, you know, I when we went to the holiday showcase event, a completely packed room with nothing a little more than just a, a panel discussion of how some associations and professional societies are starting to explore using the technology and what they're finding and how they're going. And everyone was very interested.

I think we it kinda runs the gamut at this moment of, like, there are people who are very hesitant. They have concerns about the, you know, quality of the information that's coming out of this and the risks that they might be running with this technology. There's also a lot of excitement. I think, there are some forward looking organizations are turning their people loose with these tools and saying, please, let let's find out what this means to us.

And that's a great I'm glad you you ended there because one of the conversations that Brian and I had a had a while ago and as we were preparing for this show made me think of it was when he explained what AI is to me. Full disclosure, I thought it was sort of a more robust Google, and Brian did a really good job at explaining it to me. So I'm gonna put him on the spot and have him explain it to you.

It's not just a better goo oh, yeah. I said that. Okay. Yes. So alright.

So very interesting because I I you wouldn't be wrong for thinking that in the first place because of the way that this made its debut to people. You know, to be clear, AI and machine learning, these are technologies that have been in development probably for decades now. I think the big splash that really just happened in November of twenty twenty two was scene. I think, they really OpenAI really packaged this thing in a way that was very accessible and kind of opened a lot of people's eyes to the, you know, surprising capabilities of what this tool could do. And they presented it in a interface that looked a whole lot like a search engine.

So for most people's experiences, if they sit down in front of a type you know, a prompt and start typing things and they get answers, they kinda think, oh, that's just like Google. I do that every day. But what is getting generated is quite a bit different here. I think, you know, you you have to look at this a little closer and think, first of all, if it's like Google, it's it's kind of a worse Google because if you're just basing it on this thing was trained on information that came from a web search from 2021. It it really doesn't know anything past November 2021.

At least it didn't at the time. Oh. So if you just wanna use it for that, you know, you're you're kind of looking at old information. I guess the the true genius of this is that you're this thing can reason over things and produce content to specification based on what you you prompt it to do. And that's to unpack that for a second, you just you effectively you're asking it, please summarize in three to five points what trends are important right now in member retention.

Mhmm. It's going to go to its content. Look for things that relate to this, and then follow your instructions to find a way to give you between three to five points of this, and you can direct it. It's like, okay, summarize these in 10 words or less. Goes back.

Does the same. And this is this is not what Google is doing. You know, this is, effectively, this is a this is reasoning over data. You know, I think what people are maybe don't realize in, like, the first glance is that it can do things pretty substantially that are this is categorically quite a bit different.

When you say it can go to its content, tell me more about that.

This is fascinating. The the they train the way that the, the models are trained, they're looking at a catalog of a large set of information. So probably the biggest information in human history is the content of the Internet. So OpenAI and Meta and other firms that are putting together the big, big models over, you know, billions and billions of tokens are taking script, basically, crawls of the Internet as it was. You know, they they periodically will update these, and ChatGPT was built on one that was finished sometime in November of twenty twenty one.

So we look at that content and pull that in and build a prediction model of what will be the next word or token in a sequence. I guess tokens are not words, but, you know, to kind of simplify this a little bit. The the only thing that it's doing is predicting what the next token in the sequence will be. And then based on something called waiting, we can give you a probability of what the potential tokens might be. And then it tries to introduce kind of some variability to sort of model what humans are like.

We don't always pick the same word every time. So if you want this to seem more human like, you can add something called the temperature. A lower temperature means that we're going to pick something that is a little more deterministic. Up the temperature, and we're going to make something that's a little more variable. So it picks the next token in the sequence.

It may may may pick the one off the top list or it might go, let's pick the fourth one. Then we redo the whole thing again, look at this whole sequence, pick the next one, and so on. And this is how it comes up with really quite different answers depending on who asks it at any given time Mhmm. Which is really interesting. But you can also I think one of the things that we're seeing a lot of now in the early development, you can bring more information into the prompt and have it reason over this and create answers on things that are not known to it in its base model but are brought to it from outside in the system.

And that's this is how systems are getting put together at this moment is, like, we your public you know, your private information is not in chat GBT. And if it is, then something bad happened. That's

that's a different issue. Yeah.

That's that's a different problem. But if you bring information to this, this whole mathematical model of what token comes next, as these models get bigger and bigger, they get almost eerily but good at predicting these things. So being able to bring information in, reason over it, and produce the kind of content that you want, if you can give it directions to do this, is proving very effective. It's kind of an interesting time as we start throwing this technology at things and seeing what it's good for and what it isn't. That's we're all gonna be learning a lot this year.

Mhmm.

Definitely. Definitely. It's so fascinating that you're talking about, well, it sounds like we'll we'll be talking about this a lot more in 2024, but talking about public exception or understanding of AI and specifically the milestone of ChatGPT being released. I looked into some some Pew research on public acceptance of AI, and they conducted study prior to the re release of CHAT GPT and after. And what's interesting is that Americans are more concerned about AI after the release of Chatt GPT and they had exposure to it for about a year.

It's leading them to be more concerned about it.

Isn't that interesting?

Yeah. Fascinating. I'm not as surprised by that. I have to say, maybe it's from being a former teacher and just thinking, oh my god, how are kids gonna, you know, use this? I don't have to worry about that.

But I I'm not too surprised by that. I think for for people who are maybe not as technologically inclined such as myself, it feels like such a big leap. And it feels like, Brian, everything that that you were talking about, have our expectations of technology just exploded so wide? Is it becoming something that we can't we feel like we can't handle or we can't manage? And I think, you know, probably the answer to that is it it depends on who you are.

What our expectations are and what is possible is being reset. I think that there's always uncertainty in these moments where you have something that is disruptive. Mhmm. Yeah. This technology may have been years in the making, but most people didn't see it until suddenly there's a realization like, oh, it can do that.

Yep. And you're either going to be really excited about that or maybe a little scared of that or really terrified of it. Interesting, Catherine. You you, you know, you could talk more to this about the research in 1994 looking at, like, how, you know, the early days of the Internet when people weren't as you know, this was not a part of their everyday lives. And as they first started seeing this, like, oh, that's neat.

And this idea that, like, universal communication over very long distances was going to be, you know that used to be very hard to getting easier to suddenly the floodgates open, and it's ubiquitous. And we have kind of had to reckon with what that means to us, and it's it's going to take a while.

Definitely. Yeah. You've mentioned that 1994 study. Yeah. I was just taking a look at that.

It's talking about, the Times Mirror Survey of Technology put together by the Princeton Survey Research Associates, is a really fascinating study where it's looking at, the use of personal computers back in 1994. And, I just thought it was really fascinating that at the time when they took the survey, only 6% of Americans had the ability to go online at home. But 65% of Americans at the time liked the idea of computers and technology.

Mhmm. So just computers. I mean, this was before this isn't Internet, which is just having a desktop computer in your home was it took years to get to this point, but I'd say the Internet was this, like, dividing line. Like, suddenly, these it went from this is kinda nice to, like, you have to have one of these.

Mhmm. Absolutely. Well, yeah, this is another quote, regarding the information superhighway. Oh.

The I way. I heard

that one.

Which was a promise to, it was a revolutionary change comparable to or exceeding the effects of any technological revolution in history according to Al Gore.

And that was pitched in 1994.

In 1994. Yeah.

He was probably right.

Yeah. Yeah.

In hindsight.

Mhmm.

But was it a net positive in all cases? That one's a little little tougher to chew on. So we're we might be at another one of those moments right now. Certainly, from what I've seen in, you know, going around and going to conferences and being talking to people, reading, it's this is there's hype cycles and then there's, you know, really big hype cycles. And this is one of those on the latter side.

Mhmm. Well, it's interesting, Erin, that you talked about a generational gap earlier, for both the Internet and the the topic of AI and chat GPT. There were generational gaps in acceptance and the idea of, moving forward. Like, the use of these things in our daily lives, where definitely the younger generations were more excited, more open to it than the older generations were less excited, more concerned.

Mhmm. Well I think there's and I I will not speak for my generation, which really having been born in 1981, some people would argue that I'm a millennial, but I didn't have a smartphone until twenty fifteen. So I I categorically disagree that I'm a millennial for that reason alone. But I think there was a I feel like I was in that time where it was basically don't click on anything. Everything's dangerous on the computer.

And so there's still that, you know, maybe have some some thoughts around that that that linger with us. But I I think this looking at the technology, Brian, you you hit the nail on the head. But for me was this has been in production for a while, but all of a sudden, it was like chat GPT. What is this thing? And that's where I for me, that's where some reluctance can come from is I didn't see this on the horizon at all, and now there's this new thing.

And I'm not entirely sure or nobody has presented necessarily the objectives of this or the strengths or the liabilities around this technology. And I think that's a really important conversation to have.

I think we'll be spending a lot of time there this year. A lot of people are asking these questions and, they're they won't this won't move forward or become what it could be unless it's going to get that acceptance. Mhmm. And I'm not even saying it has to have universal, like, oh, absolutely. Let's do exactly what the, you know, the first people who used it say we should do with it.

It's, it's when this great brain share comes you know, when we get this mind share and attention on something like this, it takes a while to really reckon with that and figure out what what this is going to be. So I think, those those questions are largely going to be answered in the next year or so. But I I can I can tell you just, like, from looking at it, it is going to change how you do your job? Mhmm. Mhmm.

Like, as a coder, as someone who, like, has developed software for, you know, for a living for many years, this is changing things. There is there is a class of problem that is just it's not worth you spending your time on anymore. Yeah. You can describe this to a machine, and it will spit out code that is actually halfway decent. And you can take that, you can edit it, you can ask for improvements, and then you can run that.

And you will have cut your workload in, like, a substantial margin. And I think, you know, a lot of people are concerned about job loss with this technology. I think, you know, as I've heard it said a few times in different forums that, you know, this technology will not take jobs by itself, but people with this technology could supplant you if you do not get to know this.

Mhmm.

And as we talk about, you know, the audience that we, you know, with associations, this is a really great opportunity for associations. It's also fraught with peril. This moment where potentially the things the lower value things that you deliver to your members are they've been kind of on a decline for a long time. If they hit rock bottom, they really don't need you for certain types of things. However, there is, you know, you know, there's a silver lining in here as well.

If you can bring expertise and explain what it is that you do to something, you know, to an agent or a chat bot or something, you know this domain probably much better than most people do because you spend all day in it. Most people, most people are generalists who are,

you know, kind of zipping in and out of things and things.

But as a professional society or an association, you see the best of what's going on and you you're immersed in your space all the time. You could use that expertise in ways that would probably yield better results than most people can get out of a tool like this. Mhmm. Finding a way to make that happen is probably that's that's where the exploration is. And you also have the benefit of all this great content that you've been making, most of which is not available to the public Internet, which means it's not in this model.

So if you bring the right things to the party and can direct it and do useful things, I think there's gonna be some really amazing things happening here.

Mhmm. And I and I love this idea that you don't have to be a a techie as sometime referred to. In fact, it's really important to have a wide variety of people inputting into these models so that you get a really cohesive, picture coming out of them and and a lot of collaboration and that that's the spirit of associations.

Two words to leave with here. Prompt engineering. There is an entire discipline coming up right now about how do you craft a prompt that goes into a tool like chat GPT or a large language model a similar large language model tool. How do you craft a prompt so that you get the optimal results and have it return what you were intending to get? This is going to be a bit of an art form for a while.

Mhmm. I think, you know, this could evolve and the the tools might make it so that it becomes really easy to write shorthand and get exactly what you want, but that moment isn't right now. So if you can figure that out, you can spend some time and, like, learn some of the techniques of this. You you can do amazing things with these things already.

Mhmm. Prompt engineering, I'm sure we will have a show on that in the future. We couldn't even scratch the surface on all of the AI talk today. But point being, this is really where you saw standing room only at these conferences.

Yes. Well, getting back to data, I mean, let's don't forget that thread here. If you if you don't present the right information to a tool or to your people or to your community, you're not going to get the results that you're seeking. Mhmm. So it's this is a good time for you to start looking at what your, you know, what your offering really is.

Maybe, you know, taking a really good critical eye and maybe, you know, cleaning some things up and tidying up so that you can point the right resources at this and give the best answers.

Good data in, good data out.

Absolutely. Simple as that.

Perfect.

And you just gotta go do it.

You just gotta do it. Great way to start the year, just like I have to to go to the gym. So full circle.

Alright.

If you are an association professional and would like to be on association data points, reach out to us. We'd love to and would like to be on association data points, reach out to us. We'd love to hear what you have to say.

Fantastic. And we'll have some instructions on how to do that in the show notes, I suppose.

We will. Indeed.

Awesome. Yeah. We we we've got a little more work to do on that side of this fence this year. So, stay tuned. I think the the website's gonna get better and all

kinds of fun things.

And we're looking forward to a lot of great more lot more great content this year. Also, some more visits from Catherine.

Yes. Thank you. Yeah.

Thanks for joining us today, Catherine.

Bring me some data. The facts every time. Yeah. I really appreciate that.

Happy day to New Year, everyone.

Happy day to New Year.

Happy day to New Year.

Association DataPoints is brought to you by Hargrove and Associates. Since 1985, we've helped associations serve the most critical member data needs needs by collecting, producing, and delivering exclusive market information. You can visit us online at hardgrovedata.com.