Copper Conferencing sponsors legal associations across the country, but no single association sponsorship has been more insightful and valuable than the one we have with the LMA Capital Chapter.
To invest in an association group, we need to determine if the audience finds our services relevant, if our expertise is additive, and if we can generate enough revenue to warrant the investment. We came into the year with LMA believing that every firm's marketing group should be using webinars, but were immediately surprised at how few firms did so. Our quest was to find out why and here is how you helped us.
In our initial contacts, we found that many of you were facing common business challenges. Firms needed to engage in client development activities but the high profile attorneys were not always willing to be showcased. As with our friends at ALA, we found that marketing was expected to do more with less staff and less money and IT departments prioritized webinar support low on the food chain in favor of other initiatives.
We came to lunch meetings and were surprised when Mark Beese crushed our paradigm of what we believed was the average personality type of a lawyer. We thought they resembled Johnny Cochran or Nancy Grace....outgoing, attention-seeking and confident. The research revealed that lawyers were suspicious, distrustful and afraid of trying new things. No wonder that the thought of any client development activity was daunting for so many of them.
Over the next months, more patterns began to emerge. Webinars required a lot of work that didn't include the actual event itself. People needed to be invited, registered, notified and reminded requiring multiple technologies, all with little interaction from IT.
Reluctantly, we came to the same conclusion that many Capital Chapter LMA members did - webinars were just too hard. The faint of heart would have walked away, but instead, we learned from all of you and got busy. We created technology to manage the promotional and administrative activities and a template for how to manage a nervous, distrustful attorney so he could speak confidently.
We learned that talking about our technology was not enough; we had to prove it. At the half-day event we had a new idea - we'll do an entire webinar for you - promote, register, manage and deliver. We know that there are reasons to shy away from the technology, but we are counting on the fact that you've been very good teachers over the last year and Copper has the capacity to return the favor.
It's not about the lunches, the good company or socials.....for Copper it's been about learning, adjusting, and meeting a much underserved market for what we do. Thanks LMA!
Written for the September/October 2011 Issue of the Capital Ideas Newsletter