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, then, you can 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.

Not a Task for the Fainthearted

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.

Let’s take a look at this process in more detail.

Analyze Your Offerings

Start by conducting a 360-degree analysis of your PD offerings. This can be an extensive, and expensive, activity. However, once you have completed this analysis effort the first year, you will have created the foundation for all future competitive analyses. Subsequent efforts will take much less time.

The list below provides a comprehensive set of questions for you to consider in analyzing your offerings against those of other “competitive” organizations that are delivering content your members would be interested in.

Answer these questions for your association’s offerings, as well as competitor offerings. Note that using Excel is probably your best approach in this effort, using drop-down menus for several of these.

1. What are your association’s core values driving its mission and vision?
2. Describe the professional development pricing strategy for your organization.
3. For each course, curriculum, workshop, conference, etc. provided by your association list the title, learning objectives, time and type of training (instructor-led, eLearning, virtual instructor-led, white paper, podcast, etc.).
4. List member segment this professional development offering is
5. Briefly describe the target audience(s) member characteristics for this course professional development piece.
6. Determine the return on investment for each piece of content ((Benefits minus costs) / Costs) *100
7. Identify the strength(s) of this course. (Drop down menu may include items such as “skills-focused” and “supports higher-level thinking skills”.)
8. List the weaknesses of this course. (Drop down menu may include items such as “focuses on knowledge only” and “does not support effective learning”.)
9. Rate content effectiveness in training skill + knowledge (post-test grades, ratings 3 months out for implementation)
10. Describe content alignment to certification/licensure blueprint specifications (optional).
11. Breakdown the cost in separate categories for the learning object’s design, development, delivery, marketing/advertisement, and use in learning management system (LMS).
12. Provide separate numeric evaluation ratings by those taking the course (for questions such as: confidence in skill; sufficient practice; skills were modeled well through part-task and whole-task practice; positive personal attributes for in-person training, such as instructor was prepared, course material explained quickly, confusing points cleared up; class time used well; course met my expectations; what was particularly valuable or engaging; what part(s) of training could be improved, etc.) This will require several labelled columns.

These questions serve as the foundation for your assessment of all professional development offerings. Pick and choose them as you wish for your analysis. They can also be used to review professional development offerings of your key direct and indirect competitors. If time and cost are issues that preclude your engaging in this approach, a far simpler way of analyzing your information is by using this competitive analysis template.

Identify Your Competitors

It is probably not difficult to identify your closest competitors, even if you have only worked within your particular industry for a few years. In this effort, you can also query your association’s board of directors, as well as your wider membership, to identify direct competitor sources of PD content. These will be associations or other organizations that:

• Offer similar products or services
• Target the same audience
• Operate in the same geographic area or industry
• Offer professional development to the same membership due to being a state-level association that feeds into a national or international association (or vice versa)

It may be more difficult to identify your main indirect competitors. Once again, talking with your board members and other association membership leaders, or sending them a brief survey, should enable you to identify these indirect competitors. Using the list below can help you more clearly identify who competes with your association’s PD efforts indirectly.

• Associations that are siphoning PD dollars by pulling sponsors, exhibitors, and advertisers away from your association
• Online communities and social media networks assembled by for-profit, association, or nonprofit entities through mailing list acquisition
• Businesses (sponsors, corporate partners, consultants) who sell products and services to association members
• Academic and other educational institutions that are well able to build out skills-focused courses that meet exam and licensure requirements
• Cooperative purchasing groups that can negotiate supplier discounts, resulting in more cost-effective PD offerings

The number of competitor PD offerings you want to examine is up to you. We suggest that you identify at least three direct and indirect competitors each, but the choice is yours. Once you have identified your competitors to your satisfaction, you must analyze their specific offerings, just as you did with your organization’s offerings.

After you’ve analyzed your competitors’ offerings, you will likely find ways to update the analysis of your association’s PD offerings.Once tweaked, you can proceed to conduct your competitive analysis.

Conduct Your Competitive Analysis

By this point, you have a great deal of information at your disposal to conduct your competitive analysis. Here you and your team will want to do the following:

• Identify your strengths and weaknesses compared with those of your competitors.Ask yourself: What are your unique selling points? What are your areas for improvement?
• Compare your actual offerings to competitors. Ask yourself: How do our programs stack up against each of theirs? Where specifically are the threats to our organization’s position coming from and how do I mitigate those threats?
• Identify opportunities to fill gaps in the market and address unmet needs.
• Refine your strategy. Ask yourself: How can I improve programs, pricing, marketing, or other aspects of my business to gain a competitive advantage?

Next Steps

Your association exists to serve your members, and the money you bring in from your PD offerings is one of the top three ways it obtains the funds it needs to stay solvent. Losing your members’ attention, and money, to one of your many competitors is a clear and unacceptable possibility. Knowing that you have limited dollars available to you, it’s essential that you stay on top of your PD offerings through competitive analysis so that you continue to deliver high-quality and desired professional development to your members.