Start With Strategy

Your association’s content can be easily adapted by developing efficient systems such as, adding value to your overall strategy, incorporating the use of AI, performing environmental scans through internal and external collaboration, and implementing continuous experimentation through evaluation. The first step to making your content more versatile starts with your association’s strategic plan. Begin by evaluating your organizational goals and objectives to gain a deep understanding of your audience. This foundational work is essential to developing content that truly resonates with the communities you serve.

Questions to ask before creating or repurposing content could include:

• What is our mission?
• What objectives do we want to accomplish?
• What gaps do we need to address?
• Who is our target audience?

Reflect on the purpose of your content and how it can add value to your overall strategy and address needs. By taking an integrated approach, you can lay the groundwork for successful implementation.

You should also remember that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You can review your educational program policies to reassess when you expire content. It’s important to have current content, but you also want to make sure you’re not missing content that could be evergreen. You can recategorize that content and offer it in your on-demand library.

As an example, the Society for Public Health Education created new subcommittees to review content from previous conferences and toolkits and assess what is evergreen and make current with minor updates. Once that’s been determined, the content will be retagged by learner journey, competencies, and topic type. Quick content updates allow the organization to repurpose content more efficiently and provide current information to members.

How To Incorporate AI

Learning professionals, like other association staff, are often asked to do more with less. In the past, this has often meant finding ways to create good volunteer content—like speaker guides and presentation reviews—that can be reused after an event has occurred—e.g., as session recordings. While techniques such as these are still necessary, new technologies allow association staff to efficiently make learning content more versatile than ever before.

One development that makes this all possible is AI. Capturing the transcript of a webinar or conference session allows association employees to dramatically increase the ways they can repurpose or reuse presentations. For example, they could input the transcript into a generative AI tool to:

1. Provide a summary. Quickly transform a transcript into key points that can be used for marketing, job aids, blog posts, or infographics that would summarize the learning event for those who could and could not attend the session.
2. Inform your association’s chatbot. Don’t let the information and a presentation disappear once the conference or webinar is over. Human-reviewed transcripts can help inform your association’s knowledge base.

AI can also help increase the quality of your content as it is being designed so that it is worth reusing in traditional or AI-assisted ways. At the School Nutrition Association’s 2024 annual conference, all volunteer speakers were given free access to an AI speech coach as they were developing their presentations. This new tool helped speakers practice and gave them direct feedback on:

• Key points—to ensure that their content was aligned with the session’s objectives
• Pacing and monologues—for a more engaging audience experience
• Word choice—to monitor for filler words, non inclusive language, and repetition

You’re Never Alone

As you refine your content strategy, reach out to your network to conduct an environmental scan. ASAE’s online community, Collaborate, is a valuable resource that offers a wealth of information and practical advice. Through Collaborate, you can easily search for specific topics or start conversations with association colleagues about their content strategies. You will quickly discover that you do not need to start from scratch.

Remember, experimentation is a crucial part of refining your content strategy. View it as an ongoing learning opportunity to better understand your target markets. Staying informed about industry trends will enable continuous improvement—and don’t forget to utilize metrics and evaluation tools as you work toward making your content more versatile.