Tammy Ven Dange of Roundbox Consulting chats with Rob Wenger, CEO of Higher Logic about their online community software engagement and marketing for Associations.
In this interview, we learn about:
- 00:17 About Higher Logic
- 00:54 Higher Logic clients
- 01:32 How Rob got involved with Higher Logic
- 05:58 More about Higher Logic clients
- 08:04 Higher Logic functionality
- 10:24 Higher Logic roadmap
- 13:41 Is Higher Logic as a replacement for MailChimp and Campaign Monitor?
- 15:11 Higher Logic partners
- 16:44 Final thoughts
- 17:31 Learn more about Higher Logic
Links and Resources:
- More info about Higher Logic: https://www.higherlogic.com
Other Vendor Videos:
Our Vendor Video Library is growing every month. If you liked this video, you might find these other vendor videos useful too:
Tammy regularly helps Not for Profits make IT investment decisions. Let her know if you need some help.
Tammy Ven Dange is a former charity CEO, Association President, Not for Profit Board Member and IT Executive. Today she helps NFPs with strategic IT decisions as an independent consultant. She does not take commissions nor sign partnership arrangements with vendors.
Video Transcript with Higher Logic (Minor modifications have been made for clarity)
Tammy Ven Dange – Today I welcome Rob Wenger, CEO of Higher Logic. Rob, thanks for joining me today.
Robert Wenger – Thank you, happy to be here.
About Higher Logic
Tammy Ven Dange – So Rob, tell us more about Higher Logic.
Robert Wenger – Our main products are online community software. So the idea is to get members of Associations to share, talk to each other, ask questions, share documents, basically engage with one another and the industry.
Then we also make marketing automation software, so communicating out to the members. So it can be anything from blast email marketing through very sophisticated marketing campaigns that run for years or something like that. So it’s really just about communicating and engaging members for their benefit
Higher Logic clients
Tammy Ven Dange – Just for the benefit of this audience, now, we’re talking specifically like member-based organisations, large Associations, unions. Is there anything else that comes to mind?
Robert Wenger – Yeah, I mean, we do make stuff for corporations as well. We have some really big ones, IBM, Oracle, Broadcom, Acer. So we have a lot of big companies as clients as well.
But most of our clients are Associations and they range in size from, you know, so small that they’re managed by an AMC or one or two staff up through the biggest ones in the US.
So they might have hundreds and hundreds of staff or zero to two. And all of it works, and we price it accordingly. So little guys pay a lot less than big guys do.
How Rob got involved with Higher Logic
Tammy Ven Dange – And Rob, how did you get involved in Higher Logic?
Robert Wenger – Back in 2007, I came up with this idea, it was based on LinkedIn. LinkedIn at the time was pretty new. I joined really early and didn’t find really anybody I knew on there.
So I thought to myself, you know, if you had an Association with like 50,000 members, they would all know each other, right? And so the idea was if you had that same kind of tools available to people who regularly talk anyway that it would be a network that worked right away.
That was the initial thing, a community tool for connecting people in an Association. And then it built into sharing files and having threaded discussions and, you know, all this kind of stuff that we do today. Today, we’ve added events, we’ve added mentoring, we’ve added volunteer management, and all kinds of additional things that are tools for members to use to work with each other.
But that was a long journey. So yeah, it’s been a lot of fun, but it’s evolved from that simple idea to something much bigger.
Tammy Ven Dange – Am I correct? I understand that you were the CEO and then you left, and then you recently have come back?
Robert Wenger – Yep, that’s right, yep, exactly.
I was CEO from the beginning, and then we brought in a private equity partner in 2016, and that afforded us the ability to do a bunch of acquisitions. We acquired four companies in 2017, and then we spent the next year or so bringing them on board and getting everybody up.
By the end of 2018, we were 360 staff, and it just became a really big management task for me and my team. And so we all decided collectively that there are people who are better at managing teams that large. I ended up replacing everyone on my executive team, including myself with people who, like, that’s what they do.
The guy that I brought in to replace me, Kevin Boyce, he did a really good job while I was away operationalizing things, putting in processes and procedures, and really making the company operate much, much more efficiently.
When you grow from one to 360, and especially through acquisition, if you get a lot of stuff, it’s not optimal. So, he spent the next five years optimising, but he wasn’t really a product visionary, he was more of an operations expert.
I came back because really AI… So I bought these two companies, Informz and Real Magnet, which are the market automation tools, and we integrated them into our community. But I had this vision of being able to automate a lot of the jobs that people do in the Associations, communicating with members and getting members to become more engaged and things like that.
And so that was the reason for buying the tools and had these great plans, but they were difficult. It was difficult to sort of automate that for our 2,200 Association clients.
But then AI came out like a year ago. I mean, it’s been out forever, but it came out to really be good. And it just struck me as, “Whoa, this is going to solve the problem.”
And so I’m a tech guy, I’m a software developer. I got super excited about it, started playing with it, and then eventually, it was like, all right, we got to do this. And so we went to the board and said, “Hey, you know, AI is here. We need to be using it. I’ve got this vision.”
I laid it out for them and they said, “Okay, yeah, come back and do that.” And Kevin was great. He was done, he’s mission accomplished. And for me it’s like a new chapter.
One of the fun things too when I came back is we have a great chief operating officer, and she, in the interim, has taken over all of the stuff that I didn’t like.
So it was great for me to come back. I mean, I’m ultimately responsible, obviously, but I focus on product and engineering and sales and marketing, and she does all this stuff I don’t really care about, like, not care about, but things like finance and HR and operational details.
And she’s great at that. I’m much more thinking about the future. So yeah, it’s a great partnership we have.
More about Higher Logic clients
Tammy Ven Dange – Well, I’d love to know more about the roadmap in a second, but first of all, let’s talk about some of your current clients. You did mention some really big ones. Who are some of your clients here in Australia?
Robert Wenger – So Australia, I think all of our clients or most of our clients in Australia are Associations. So Australian Dental Association, CPAs, Union Hub, which is an organisation of a bunch of Australian unions, and actually, I think even some European unions that they’ve put together a software package almost like an AMC would do.
And they run the backend of these unions. And so those are sort of our biggest clients, but we have tonnes of them going down to tiny, tiny ones as well.
Tammy Ven Dange – And so do you have an ideal client within that Association space?
Robert Wenger – Ideal client – I would say is a professional Association or a union that acts like that, right?
The unions in Australia are a little different than the ones here in that they do education, they do certifications and things like that. In the US, they’re more government oriented or more, you know, negotiating with the companies as opposed to educating the members.
That’s an interesting thing that I wasn’t aware of when we started in Australia that worked out really well.
So really anything where it is professionals who would like to talk to each other, that’s our ideal client. And it really is mostly Associations.
In Australia, like I said, it’s almost all Associations. And even here though, it’s mostly Associations.
We have 200 million members across all of our clients, if you add ’em all up. And they’re talking all the time. We do something like a billion interactions a month, a little more than a billion interactions a month. It’s a lot of members helping each other, the organisations communicating key things to them, et cetera.
Higher Logic functionality
Tammy Ven Dange – Now, it’s interesting when you talked originally about LinkedIn being kind of your model to start with.
For those people that haven’t seen Higher Logic and they’re familiar with maybe a CRM or Association Management System, but they haven’t seen Higher Logic before, how should they consider it?
Can you say it’s like a fancy version of LinkedIn? I mean, how would you describe it to someone who hasn’t seen it before?
Robert Wenger – Yeah, it has a lot of features, but the one that really moves the needle for most Associations is what we call the community feature, which is where members with like interests talk to each other, ask questions, share documents, answer questions, all that kind of stuff.
It’s a communication back and forth between the members. And so there are people who subscribe to that in real time – I ask a question, you get it, you answer it, it comes right back to me.
Most of the members though subscribe to what we call the Daily Digest. And what happens there is all the real-time stuff that’s happening, or even the stuff that’s happening overnight gets summarised and sent to all the members in the morning.
If you’re a member of, you know, almost any Association in the US, you’re going to see an email from us in the morning, and it’s everything that happened in the industry yesterday, right?
It’s what people care about, what they’re talking about. If it’s, you know, relevant news, if it’s government type stuff, that’s very immediate. And then often it’s just questions and answers and sharing of resources.
So it’s very collaborative. In fact, most of our clients name their thing Collaborate or something like that because it really is meant for the members to help each other out.
And what you would see is a bit like LinkedIn, except it’s more threaded than LinkedIn. So LinkedIn is more of a feed, which we also have in our sites.
If you go to the Hubs homepage, you’re gonna see a feed. But most members interact with their friends and cohorts and colleagues through the email.
And that’s one kind of differentiator between us and most of the other community systems in the world is that you can get this daily digest and reply to it, and it will thread it.
You can get it right from your phone or your email client, right? So you don’t have to log into a website and find the thread and reply. You can do it just replying to the email.
That generates a lot more content than ones that have that sort of barrier of getting me there, “What’s my login?” All that kind of stuff.
Higher Logic roadmap
Tammy Ven Dange – Yeah, interesting. Okay. And so I delayed the question already, but I’d love to know more about your roadmap.
Robert Wenger – The roadmap. Yeah. The major portions of the roadmap are around what I call the three As. So it’s automation, analytics, and AI. And automation is the key. We want to automate as much as we can.
Basically, we think of an Association having, let’s say it has 20 positions, right? So you have membership and accounting and blah, blah, those positions. But within that, those people have jobs, right? The jobs to be done, we call it.
We want to automate as many of the jobs to be done as we can so that the Association staff can focus on all the stuff they never get to, right?
So usually when I talk about this in a bigger group, I’ll ask, “How many of you have enough time and resources to do everything you want to do?” And of course, nobody does, right?
We want to take those things that could be done by a computer, get them done by a computer, and then you can focus on the things that really matter and will move the needle for the organisation, for the industry, really.
And so when we talk about automation, a lot of it, in our cases, is around engagement. So getting members the value that they joined for, right? They’re going to join to be educated, to be certified, to meet peers, network, move forward in their careers, all those sorts of things, especially professional Associations.
We have this concept we call micro campaigns, which is communication campaigns. We have 100 of them defined so far. They’ll probably be 150. But the idea is most Associations operate in a very similar manner, even if they’re in different industries.
We want to automate the communication in these 150 little campaigns to just get people, every now and then, not every day to engage with the organisation or their peers. And so think of it as a 150 little bots running around, saying, “Oh, it’s time to talk to this person. It’s time to talk to this person.”
It’s sending out little messages. And so, we would automate, you know, big portions of join, renew, onboarding, education, certification, all those little bits that everybody does. And again, this was my vision years ago when I bought those market automation companies.
Now though, we can say this is the mechanism for this campaign. The content that gets written for a particular Association gets written by an AI. So we can define through what’s called prompt engineering, what the message really is going be about with the details being filled in by a kind of a mail merge and knowledge we know about the Association’s members.
And so, if I define 150 of these things once for professional Associations, I could say given a professional Association and say, okay, make me these campaigns for that organisation with that membership, and this is what they do and here’s the details about membership and events and things like that.
It can build them all out at once. And so, we find that most Associations don’t spend a lot of time thinking strategically about their member communications. We can do that once and then just turn it on for all 2,200 Associations that our clients of ours.
Is Higher Logic a replacement for MailChimp and Campaign Monitor?
Tammy Ven Dange – So is Higher Logic a replacement also for… like a Mailchimp or a Campaign Monitor?
Robert Wenger – Yeah, it could be for sure. I think a lot of our clients use it that way. In fact, the market automation tools start off as those kinds of tools. They started in the Mailchimp type world of blast emailing.
They evolved into market automation, more sophistication around that, integration with a lot of the Association Management Systems and other tools Associations use.
And then, of course, even today we have templates that start campaigns. Because all of our clients are Associations, we can focus on the solutions that they need as opposed to a Mailchimp, which is just a mailer, right?
Or even something as sophisticated as HubSpot is going to be a blank slate, whereas we’re going to deliver, stuff that’s already proven for Associations.
So we have, I think about 15 or 1,600 Associations running the market automation. And those tools, by the way, are just for Associations.
The community, we have about a third of our clients are our corporations, but for the market automation tools and the stuff that I’m talking about around the AI-based automation, that’s mostly for Associations.
Higher Logic partners
Tammy Ven Dange – And I feel like there’s also a bit of a blur between the CRM or the Association Management System and your tools as well in terms there might be an overlap of capabilities. I’m familiar with some of your partners like iMIS. Do you have others that you work with?
Robert Wenger – Well, we have about 100 partners and probably 70 to 80 of them are other software solutions. In the US, there are lots and lots of membership systems. In Australia, there’s not that many.
iMIS is our big one there. Causeis is a great partner there that helps our clients get a lot of benefit out of these tools, that kind of thing.
We also do have 12 staff in Australia, so we have kind of almost round-the-clock support because of that.
For the American clients, they can get support out of Australia at night and vice versa. So that’s a big advantage.
We have several other, in Australia, it’s probably more like eight or nine partners. But the US just, you know, we have a lot more clients here and we have a lot more variety of systems that they use.
Tammy Ven Dange – Yeah, sure. I reckon there’s probably about 12 active, you know, CRM types for Associations here.
Robert Wenger – Yeah and, of course, we do Salesforce and Microsoft CRM and Sugar and all those kind of less membership, more CRM type systems.
And then there are, of course, membership systems built on those CRMs. So we integrate the membership portions of our tools with those extensions as well.
So yeah, in Australia, most of our clients are going to have iMIS or Salesforce probably, or Microsoft CRM.
Final thoughts
Tammy Ven Dange – Okay, well, is there anything else you want to share, Rob?
Robert Wenger – Just excited to be in this market in Australia. I was just there, you know, a couple of weeks ago. We met in person, which was a lot of fun at the AuSAE conference, which was also a lot of fun.
And we are going to be building more out in Australia. There’s an equivalent Australian Association to the American ones that we have as clients. So it makes a lot of sense to bring those tools that the American Associations have already subscribed to their counterparts in Australia.
So we’re excited to do that. It makes the world smaller and that’s kind of the key thing we’re looking for.
Learn more about Higher Logic
Tammy Ven Dange – Excellent. And if people want to know more about Higher Logic, where should we send them?
Robert Wenger – Well, www.higherlogic.com would be the easiest place. We also have a team, as I mentioned, in Australia that we can connect you with in the comments or however that works for you.
And yeah, you can always reach out to me through LinkedIn. Excited to talk to anyone really. Love talking to Associations.
Tammy Ven Dange – Rob, thank you so much for your time today, and thank you for sharing more about Higher Logic.
Robert Wenger – Absolutely. No, happy to do it, any time.