At the Memcom Conference 2023, CPL One celebrated recent work and welcomed a bright future.
It is sound commercial advice that your behaviour as a business should reflect your values, and that you should always deliver on your brand promise. Or, to put it in simple terms, actions often speak louder than words.
This basic principle came to mind last week at the Memcom Conference 2023, which was titled ‘New Horizons’. For CPL One, the title was fitting: the annual event was the public, in-person launch of our new CPL One brand identity.
The conference was the first opportunity we’ve had to say ‘Hello world’ as CPL One. A new beginning, and a next step on our combined journey – but also the summation of a lot of hard work behind the scenes in developing our new company brand identity.
Adding value for membership organisations
As part of the conference, we also delivered a session that showcased our recent work with the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP).
The talk featured insight from our senior content strategist, Martin Bewick, alongside detailed input from Chris Bull, head of member value at RCGP, on how creating an effective Member Value Proposition (MVP) can add value to professional organisations.
The room for our talk was a full house, and the discussion that followed continued well into the closing drinks and networking session.
Three rules for adding member value
In reviewing our work with RCGP and from questions on the day, we can summarise three foundational rules for delivering member value projects.
1. Data and insight – what you try to deliver for your members/audience should always be founded on quantitative and qualitative research. It’s about listening, acting on those insights, and ensuring the people to whom you have listened continue to be heard.
2. It’s a journey – and that’s something of a cliché. But seriously, play the long game. The challenge you’re tackling was there before you began the work, and will not disappear once your budget is spent and the wash-up meeting timetabled. You need to keep going, iterating, adjusting, going again.
3. Your rollout needs clear instructions – what you’ve learned needs to be actioned and actioned again. That means it needs to be ingrained into the culture. Beyond your stint explaining the plan, who will take it up? Can you pass on the baton? Who to? And what tools might they need to take it off your hands. This too needs to be part of the plan.
Can you help people belong?
The point here is not simply to complete a project, but to develop a real and open-ended sense of belonging for your members and/or wider audience. Helping people feel they are genuinely part of an organisation – that they belong there – is an ongoing process. Ensuring your plan truly belongs with the people who will help action it and live its reality should be seen as a long-term concern.
At CPL One, our purpose (as we sometimes say in public) is to help people belong. What that means may differ for each audience and business with which we work. That’s the message we set out to deliver at the Memcom conference last week. But it’s not just about talking the talk, it’s about walking the walk. Perhaps we could do some of that together.
We said ‘Hello world’ at Memcom. If you’d like to find out more about our services, say ‘Hello CPL One’.
