If you had a chance to start your association all over again, what would you do differently? Sounds fantastic, but not really when you think about it. How many associations have already undergone so much change in the last few, tough years that they hardly recognize themselves now anyway?

While many associations have been caught up in reactionary change, a few have been undergoing complete overhauls. Such is the case with Michael Stoskopf, executive officer of the Building Industry Association of Southeastern Michigan (BIA)—and the immense challenge was exactly what he had been looking for.

Prior to joining BIA, Stoskopf spent four years in private industry working for Granger Construction in Lansing. Before that, he spent 13 years at Lockheed Martin as vice president of business development. He loved his work, but was itching for increased responsibility and a chance to challenge himself as an executive leader. Stoskopf hooked up with a management recruiter who connected him with BIA in April 2008.

“People thought I was crazy to do anything with residential home building because of the downturn,” Stoskopf recalls. He went forward with the interview process anyway to see where it would take him, learning later that he was the only interview candidate outside of the association sector and the home building industry.

“During the interview process, I told them that I would run the association like a business, and that I believed this would address many of the association’s financial challenges,” he says. “And after I got the job, that’s the strategic direction we took.”

The association’s “challenges” were tough, he admits. The organization was in severe flux with declines in membership and non-dues revenue sources such as the association’s home shows and magazine. For example, the organization’s 2,200 members in December 2005 had dropped to 690 by the end of June 2010. 

And Stoskopf’s personal challenge? Even though his strategy was to run BIA like a business, he still needed a foundational knowledge on associations and how they tick, as well as some of the legal and policy differences in running associations. He needed to understand how associations and board relations differed from the private sector experience he had had so far—and he needed all this knowledge and understanding quick.

He found it in MSAE’s Association Academy. The Academy is a 11-session course (meetings are held monthly with duplicate sessions in Lansing and Farmington Hills) designed for professionals new to the association sector, those who work within the sector but want to move up the management track, or vendors who serve associations and just want to understand their customers better. Stoskopf credits the Academy with giving him the foundation he needed to more effectively make positive changes at BIA. “Sort of like doing engine maintenance while an aircraft is in-flight,” he quips.

“I found the basic professional development I needed to understand BIA and its association perspective at MSAE,” says Stoskopf. “I’ve also used MSAE functions to help brainstorm with other association executives on the challenges we’re facing. The rest is up to the team made up of the board, staff, and me.”

Question Everything
The first 18 months of his leadership, Stoskopf rethought everything about BIA. He took nothing for granted and protected nothing as a “sacred cow.”

“My first year and a half at BIA, the focus was on figuring out if there were opportunities to turn around our traditional sources of revenue,” he says. “Once those were secured, then I could turn to developing new sources of revenue—and that’s where I’ve been the last nine months or so.”

Stoskopf believes that to succeed as a vibrant organization in today’s challenging business environment, association executives must challenge the status quo—and that’s exactly what he did. “I questioned absolutely everything,” he says. “Coming in as an outsider—and with the Executive Committee’s support in running BIA like a business—I had the leeway to question everything the organization was doing. We needed to stabilize the association immediately, and everyone agreed with that. I respect tradition, but I don’t ever do something because that’s the way it has always been done.”

He asked himself if he had the right people on the bus, and if the bus was going in the right direction. And as a result of his new process control, efficiency, and improvement—including a focus on what the volunteers could deliver—Stoskopf says the association is a much stronger organization. “When the association was at its peak of 2,300 members, it had 20 staffers,” he says. “Today we have six staff members including myself, and if and when we get to that membership number again, BIA is so much more efficient now that I will only have to add one more staff person and still keep the same level of productivity and service.”

One example of a traditional revenue source becoming more “profitable” is BIA’s magazine. The magazine was published and printed monthly, but typically at break-even financially. With economic forces reducing advertising revenues, Stoskopf realigned duplicative tasks of in-house staff and external vendors to help remove unnecessary expenses. In fact, during the past year, the publication was printed only eight times, with the rest of the issues going online. As of July 2010, with the help of members and staff who sell advertising, the publication is all print again and adding $50,000 a year to the association’s bottom line. 

With the organization’s traditional revenue streams on solid ground, Stoskopf’s recent work has been on a new source of income that has the potential to dramatically change the face of BIA.

Spotlight on Consumers
As a nonprofit advocate for the construction and remodeling industry in metropolitan Detroit and southeastern Michigan, BIA’s membership includes builders, developers, remodelers, property owners, and suppliers to the single- and multi-family residential construction industry. The association’s core focus is to help its members provide high-quality homes that are safe, energy efficient, and technologically advanced.

“After some market research and talking to members, I soon realized that the best way to do that was to find a way to promote our members' businesses to the public. If we could find a way to promote our members to their customers, then the association’s value to members would take on a whole new dimension.”

The result? MyHomeCoupons.com. Simply put, MyHomeCoupons.com sells discount coupons to consumers for anything and everything related to the home, from home improvement to remodeling to new home construction. Its purpose is to help families save on all aspects of buying or owning a home, including dining, travel, remodeling, home improvement, and other products and services. In addition, at least 60 cents of every dollar collected through the website is invested back into the consumer’s community, including local charitable organizations. Therefore, by purchasing coupons through MyHomeCoupons.com, BIA members’ customers save money while helping improve their local economies.

MyHomeCoupons.com is Stoskopf’s brainchild, and he is marketing it heavily. Launched in March of this year, the website bought TV commercial space beginning in mid-July and has made a significant investment in print advertising, as well. A sign of the times, the primary marketing focus is on social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and email marketing.

The website is set up as a for-profit corporation, and the association benefits through a revenue-sharing program. For example, a consumer can purchase a coupon for $10 that allows her to save $100 on retiling a bathroom. Fifty percent of that $10 coupon revenue goes back to the association—in this example, $1 would be intended for additional promotional purposes, and $4 can be used at the association’s discretion for any purpose. Additionally, 10 percent of all coupon revenues generated by the site are distributed back to the association and earmarked for a deserving charity such as Habitat for Humanity in Detroit.

Launching MyHomeCoupons.com was not a particularly easy feat, Stoskopf says. The idea involved forging completely new territory for the association, and many were unsure it was the right path to take. BIA used numerous consumer and member focus groups to test the idea, and later, to test the actual website. The research led Stoskopf to add a blog and emails to give consumers more information and tips related to being a homeowner.

It also led to an idea from the builders association in Ann Arbor to include hometown coupons on the site for everything from restaurants to entertainment to automobiles, and more. 

He also learned from the website focus group that his target demographic for home remodeling and related services (women 25-55 years of age) were not overly impressed with the site’s original design. “I’m a 47-year-old white male, and I was designing the website that way,” Stoskopf says. “So the colors and look of the site had to change.”

“We revised the pricing and business model based on consumer input,” he says. “We want to become the vital resource for everything ‘home,’” he explains. By early September, the plan is to expand into areas across the state, in partnership with other local home builder and remodeler associations, including Ann Arbor, Lansing, Grand Rapids, and Kalamazoo.

Although MyHomeCoupons.com is still in its growth and early marketing stage, Stoskopf sees potential for other state associations that have members who sell to consumers to use the same business model. 

There’s no reason, he says, why a long-term vision for MyHomeCoupons.com couldn’t include marketing the business model to other associations.

“For example, other associations could pay a fee and become an affiliate of MyHomeCoupons.com and then get a share of the revenue,” he explains. “The same website model that’s working for us in home building and remodeling could also work for the RV association, the boating association, the automobile association, and so forth.”

Role or Re-Branding
Re-branding the association was a big part of Stoskopf’s overall strategy for BIA, and MyHomeCoupons.com is key to that effort. He is also in the process of rebranding the association’s member site at www.builders.org, giving it more of a consumer look.

“We’re going through the association’s original site and making redesigns based on what we learned in the MyHomeCoupons.com focus groups,” he says. “It’s going to be more of a consumer-based site in the future. It’s still the association members’ site, but they have a member login and separate section on the site that looks the same as it always has. If I can create value for my members’ customers, then I can create lasting value for my members.”

Stoskopf says he took great pains to communicate the purpose of the new site to BIA’s board of directors and members. “Members have responded very positively,” he says. “They love the emphasis on more consumer content and engagement.”

Sticking Together
Change has come fast and furious at BIA since Stoskopf took over, and he says that although some things have turned around, he is still immensely concerned with the association’s drop in membership. “Even with the current economic situation, there are 5,000 licensed contractors in the four-county area we cover,” he points out. “How do I convince those who are working to join the organization?”

On the flip side, most of the individuals who have remained members are emotionally committed to BIA. “Even those who dropped their membership for economic reasons stay involved in the association and promise to rejoin as soon as they can,” says Stoskopf. “It’s hard to pay dues when you have no income and haven’t built a house in three years.”

And that probably sums up best what Stoskopf has learned to admire most about his work in the association world: “The passion of members for their organizations is unparalleled in any other industry I’ve worked in,” he says. “I love what I’m doing, and I’m confident I made the right choice.”

Carla Kalogeridis (carlak@msae.org) is editor of MSAE’s Association IMPACT.

BIA tv commercial from MotionEcho Media on Vimeo.

MyHomeCoupons TV commercial from MotionEcho Media on Vimeo.