AI is taking up every function of a corporation and therefore the growth of AI will only continue. By 2030 it’s expected to contribute up to $15.7 billion to the worldwide economy. AI use isn’t constrained to traditional businesses, associations can utilize AI tools to assist them with everything from conference management and content creation to member communications and workplace organization.
Artificial intelligence is everywhere you switch these days—and it’s not the things of fantasy anymore. Traditional businesses and organizations are increasingly turning to AI to fuel their daily operations. Workplace processes are being transformed by AI innovations. AI is fuelling growth and by 2030 it’s expected to contribute up to $15.7 billion to the worldwide economy.
Clearly, the impact of AI is enormous—and it’s growing.
But this impact isn’t limited to the planet of traditional business. The revolutionary potential of AI can help all types of organizations work better—including associations. There’s a brave new world of AI out there just waiting to be harnessed by associations looking to spice up member management and engagement.
For associations, AI tools can help with everything from conference management and content creation to member communications and workplace organization. And during this post, we’ll cover five key ways in which your association can cash in on what AI has got to offer—and explain how you’ll boost member engagement within the process. Let’s dive in!
1) Use AI to offer your conferences a lift
For many associations, conferences are the bread and butter of member engagement. And by now, we’re all conversant in the ways in which tech has reshaped the conference experience: sophisticated conference apps became the norm; most conference content is accessible online; and purely virtual conferences are getting more and more common.
But AI is about to revolutionize the conference experience even further—and associations can cash in on this to fuel member management and engagement.
Take virtual conferences as an example. you’ll use AI to make a more interactive virtual experience that mimics the engagement your members would find at a standard conference. Building an AI chatbot for the conference experience, for instance , can give attendees at an outsized and anonymous-feeling virtual conference a private guide that answers questions and provides support.
AI also can help improve conference programming. You’ll use AI tools to gather useful data on things just like the sessions that members’ are attending, the topics that are attracting the foremost interest, and audience engagement trends. With this data in hand, you’ll refine the content of your conferences to form sure that it reflects member interests and priorities. Successively this will help your bottom line: if your conferences cater to the interests of your members, they’re more likely to attend.
2) Improve workplace organization
Association member management always involves a hearty dose of behind-the-scenes work and office logistics. If your team works sort of a well-oiled machine—if collaboration between teams is seamless, if staff are ready to work efficiently, if projects are well managed—connecting with members will always be a smoother, more straightforward task. And AI is often a strong tool for creating that happen.
Recently, we’ve seen an explosion in AI tools targeting workplace organization. As Spoke puts it, AI is about to rework the workplace within the coming years, changing everything from the way companies hire, to the way teams handle mundane admin tasks, to internal communication—significantly improving efficiency and productivity along the way.
For associations, this type of workplace AI is often a boon for organization and communication.
For example, there are many task tracking AI platforms out there that manage all of your team members’ tasks and timelines, streamlining the work of project managers and ablating the unpleasant task of chasing people down for overdue work.
There also are AI tools which will promote better workplace communication, by generating automatic responses to common slack messages, automatically providing translations across different languages, or automatically sorting staff into user groups which will help them communicate more efficiently.
3) Upgrade your marketing strategy
A strong marketing strategy is at the guts of association member engagement. If you would like to seek out and attract new members—and keep your existing members engaged—you have to get your name, your mission statement, and your value proposition out there. And over the previous couple of years, AI has revolutionized the way that sort of selling gets done.
Today, there’s an entire smorgasbord of tools out there that use AI to enhance marketing processes and strategy. For instance, predictive marketing tools can use AI and large data to get marketing messages which will resonate together with your target audiences.
Then there are the tools that use AI to trace existing marketing efforts to ascertain how well they’re performing, then make suggestions for enhancing performance. Or, you’ll cash in on tools that pinpoint the marketing platforms which will best assist you extend the reach and resonance of your marketing messages.
The bottom line is that AI marketing tools can deliver a huge boost to your marketing efforts. And solid marketing efforts can pay dividends in terms of member recruitment, engagement, and retention.
But these tools also are useful for little and mid-sized associations working to deliver their marketing strategy on tight budgets, with short timelines and overstretched teams. If your marketing is under-resourced, you’ll outsource vital tasks—like marketing analytics and strategy—to an AI tool which will free your staff up to focus their time and energy on other important work.
4) Build up your content creation
You know by now that content is an incredibly valuable resource for associations (and their members.) Great content boosts member engagement and retention, results in social sharing, attracts new members, and provides a concrete service that folks will return to time and again.
But content creation is often arduous and time consuming. End-to-end, the method of brainstorming, pitching, fleshing out a thought , writing, editing, and preparing a bit of content for publication eats up an enormous amount of resources.
That’s where AI comes in.
There are AI tools that assist you write faster—think voice-to-text technology that permits you to dictate a blog post or an ebook hands free. There also are AI tools that assist you brainstorm the sorts of topics that might resonate together with your audience. Then there are the plethora of AI editing tools out there that scan content for spelling and grammar errors, adjust style and tone-of-voice, and generate suggestions for tactics to enhance the standard of written content.
Whatever tool you select , the sweetness of using AI in content creation is straightforward for associations: it can assist you generate better content more quickly, giving your members more to interact with and enjoy .
5) Build better chatbots
For associations, member management nearly always involves fielding tons of questions and providing strong member support.
For many associations, chatbots are the tool of choice for managing this task. And these chatbots are great at providing a baseline level of user support. But going forward, AI is about to shake up the way these bots work. Namely, we’re seeing an increase in additional cognitive, conversational sorts of AI—that is, AI that’s ready to understand human context and nuanced language, to think creatively, and to reply to shifting situations.
That’s excellent news for associations—especially ones that rely heavily on chatbots to affect member engagement. With more responsive and cognitive AI making its way into the chatbot universe, you’ll expect your members to steer faraway from their interactions together with your bot more satisfied. But you’ll also expect your staff to benefit: with more intelligent AI, you’ll outsource more of your complex member management tasks, in order that staff can work more efficiently.
