Yesterday, I received an email from a famous copywriter who trains other writers. It was to promote her new course on how copywriters could utilize AI to write copy. In her email, she explained that some writers are effective despite being poor at the technical craft of writing. What makes them good are the ideas they’re communicating (What.) On the other hand, AI can create perfect syntax (How), but it can’t create good ideas. In the near future, AI’s like Chat GPT are going to exponentially increase the amount of content that your association competes with by lowering barriers for content creation. Despite this, you have five unfair advantages that you can leverage to rise above the noise.
The Five Advantages
- Excellent Source of Innovation. Communities tend to be at the forward edge of innovation, because whatever new technique, tactic, idea, or resource that is discovered spreads through a community faster than outside of it. As an association, you have the opportunity to be the voice of innovation.
- Members are Available and Invested. You’ve probably ran a survey (or five) in the past year and didn’t think much about the process. Consider that if if any private company or individual tried to gather data on your community, it would be a massive undertaking. The energy and costs for them to gather the data are high. It may not be easy for you, but it’s several orders of magnitude easier than for your competition.
- Built in Audience. As a community, any content you create always has an initial starting point of a built in (and invested) audience. Anyone who wants to leverage AI to create a bunch of content, has to build first build an audience and try to gain their loyalty.
- Authority. If you watch for it, you’ll notice that, often, national news stories cite this or that association for opinions or standards. The reason this occurs is because associations are perceived as inherently authoritative. Any content you created is perceived as more relevant and more trustworthy (though what you communicate needs to reinforce this.)
- Easier to Connect With Other Authorities. The advantage to being an authority is that this opens the door to other authorities. Other important people and organizations are more willing to collaborate, share, and partner with you. This creates opportunities to generate even more effective content.
An Example
During the pandemic, an association we work with created a Zoom series of webinars they called a Master Class. The best professionals in their community shared knowledge on specific aspects of the series topic. The webinars were recorded and posted on their website. They were initially free and transcribed so that they built the website’s search engine optimization. Now, the videos are a member benefit that people sign up for because it’s an authoritative series on what’s currently the best way to do things. The series both engaged members and created a natural wave of promotion as members discussed it with non-members.
The authority of the organization enabled them to get buy in for people to volunteer their expertise in sharing innovation. Then their built-in audience of membership helped to promote the result.
Your Opportunity
The good news with AI is that your organization can also employ it to more easily create web content, newsletters, and graphics. If you’re cash strapped and under staffed, AI is going to help.
But that’s not what’s actually important, which is that you need to create content worth sharing.
The real challenge will continue to be saying something that matters to people who care about it. Your opportunity is to leverage these five unfair advantages in service to your members and your industry. To tackle things that matter to them in a way that’s uniquely valuable.
Because if what you say doesn’t matter, then it doesn’t matter how you say it.