A competitive analysis of your association’s professional development (PD) offerings can enable you to identify the strength of your position with your members relative to that of your competitors. A competitive analysis can also be used to assess your association’s current offerings to determine what to keep, what to change and what to eliminate. This helps you identify the strengths, pricing models, positioning and sales strategies for your offerings. From this big picture perspective, you can then prioritize these professional development offerings you provide to your members that deliver the biggest bang for your dollar. You can also be clearheaded on the PD offerings you need to improve upon — and the ones that must be "sunsetted."
A good chunk of time is required to give you the information you need, especially when you are conducting your first PD competitive analysis. While the activity is rather extensive, the steps are clear. You must first conduct an analysis of your own association's offerings. Next, identify those organizations that either directly or indirectly compete with your PD offerings. The third step is conducting an analysis of your competitors' PD offerings.
You will apply several different tools to your competitive analysis, including assessment of current offerings and SWOT analysis. This enables you to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your current PD position as compared to your competitors, and how to address your challenges while maximizing your strengths. It also enables you to assess the threats facing your organization due to other associations’ offerings that you need to shore up. Identifying the opportunities you will want to take advantage of is also part of this effort. Armed with this information, you can develop a plan to positively differentiate your PD offerings.
Please select this link to read the complete article from ASAE's Center for Association Leadership.