Week 2 Reflection — Personal Contribution to Marketing Organizational Memberships

Part of what I am working on at ILA is establishing organizational memberships at universities. The goal of this project is to recruit members when they are in graduate school who will then remain ILA members in the future. I will be interviewing members who have bought organizational memberships in the past, to learn about their experience with the process. This week, I was working on streamlining the process of marketing this type of membership to students and the experience of signing up for the membership for students. I spent the week thinking of ways to make this process the clearest and easiest for ILA, for the administrators at the university and for the students. One obstacle I faced in this process was how the money should be paid. I concluded that it should be sent to the university key contact for ILA (like a dean or professor) and then that person should send one total check to ILA for all of the graduate students who signed up. However, I was thinking that if ILA is trying to market this type of membership to graduate students, there should be an option other than mailing a check. Most people in school do not own paper checks, or even stamps for that matter. I suggested to ILA that there should be an option to Zelle the money directly to the key contact who could then mail ILA a check. I thought that this would encourage students to sign up because it is so convenient. 

My understanding of leadership helped me to innovate and streamline this process because I was able to see how best to communicate to followers. In this case, because ILA is marketing to graduate students, although I am working for the leader, I identify more closely with the followers. This gives me a unique perspective of how to convince them to sign up. Also, the product that ILA is marketing is literally leadership, so I already have a deep understanding of the product that ILA is selling. I understand all the benefits of a leadership organization such as ILA because of all the time I have spent studying ILA, and so I can better communicate the benefits to graduate students.