How AGU’s Personalized Tech Powers Young Member Engagement (S2:E3)

Shomali: Associations across the board are looking for new ways to reach a new generation of professionals. The association we’re highlighting on today’s episode is figuring out how.

Lurie: I think what we’re doing is trailblazing. And I would love to put this in the hands of other organizations as as quickly as we can.

Shomali:  I’m Carolyn Shomali, and this is Association RevUP – a podcasted presented by the Professionals for Association Revenue that brings you the stories of associations that are using better business strategies to advance their missions…

On today’s episode, you’ll hear from Thad Lurie, Senior Vice President of Digital and Technology at the American Geophysical Union. He’ll share AGU’s new approach to content and connections that is driving member engagement, especially with their youngest career professionals.

The world is operating in an increasingly remote setting. From flexible work environments to virtual learning and online communities, the spaces where professionals gather, learn, and connect have expanded far beyond the traditional constructs of what our associations have traditionally provided.

There are challenges in this shift, particularly when it comes to the newest members of the workforce who may not rely on associations to provide content and connections they can find on their own…but there are opportunities, too, and the American Geophysical Union has found one.

AGU is a global community of earth and space scientists. Their purpose is to empower scientists and foster discovery – and while they have nearly 45,000 members, their broader community is made up of nearly half a million scientists who’ve interacted with AGU in some capacity. The AGU website houses peer reviewed scientific content and abstracts – which is a great resource for members…if they can find it.

Lurie: I actually, just to educate myself did a search on our website for a basic geological term hydrology. And we got back 10,000 results. And when I looked at our technology. I learned that it wasn’t that we got 10,000 is that was that we got the 1st 10,000, because 10,000 is the maximum returnable number.

Shomali: Lurie says AGU’s challenge was to find a way to put the right content into the hands of the right members at the right time. It’s something I spoke to Lurie about back in May 2024 as a guest for one of last season’s episodes. He hinted at how AGU was approaching this challenge, but he wasn’t quite ready to share the specifics. Still, even then, his excitement about the project was evident.

Lurie: We’re starting to do some things now that we think are going to change the game for our membership and even more broadly in the industry. There’s some things that we as an industry, not we as an AGU team, have tried to do in the past that were very, very difficult. And we were never able to be as successful as we wanted. AI has changed that. There are capabilities that did not exist 12 to 18 months ago. Not only did they not exist, but they were almost…They seemed like, you know, sorcery. Like, oh, it’s really going to be able to do that? And we all nod our heads, yeah, okay, you said that before. Well, guess what? Now it can.

Shomali: Fast forward, and that vision is no longer theoretical. It’s live, and it’s producing results.

Lurie: The results have been phenomenal. So I’ve spent a good deal of time the last 6 months or so. On the speaking circuit, which is not what I intended, but I think what we’re doing is trailblazing.

Shomali: And it all started by acknowledging the need to add member value. AGU’s membership, while inexpensive – it ranges from just 29$ for students to $70 for career professionals – was lacking in value according to Lurie.

Lurie: We didn’t have a whole lot of value in our membership, we really wanted to start driving member engagement and interest make it stickier and sort of decouple it from presenting at the annual conference, which is what perennially drives it now. More than 50% of membership made up of students and early professionals and earlier career. Folks who don’t have highly mature networks in the space, who really want to meet other people doing research like theirs. They want to meet mentors, they want to meet people in industry, they might hire them after they finish their postdoc, whatever it is, and we wanted to facilitate those connections, using their research, which is really kind of the beating heart of what they’re looking for with respect to AGU.

Shomali: AGU partnered with Tasio Labs to create an AI-powered solution that delivers what members value most: relevant content and meaningful connections. At the core of the solution is a concept Lurie refers to as a “digital fingerprint” which ensures that each member has a completely individualized experience everytime they login to the AGU website.

Lurie: That fingerprint is a very complex mathematical equation called A, vector and it can represent all of the content they publish. So let’s say, Carolyn, you’ve published 2 peer reviewed articles, and you’ve submitted 3 and scientific abstracts for annual meetings over the last 5 years, we can take those 5 pieces of content in their entirety and turn that into a very small digital picture of you. and I can then compare that picture like a fingerprint to fingerprints of other pieces of content to determine how relevant they are to the research you’ve done. I can also compare it to fingerprints of other people who are doing research that is very similar to yours. And with respect to how do we deliver that? We built it onto the front page of our website? We deliver it through HTML, 5 widgets. And essentially, when you log into the website, you come to the homepage. It has a scrolling carousel. 7 groups of 3 people that say, you know, connect with people who are doing research like you, and it’s got their picture, and you know their university, their affiliations, whatnot, and you can click on it, and it’ll take you to their profile.

And what we’ve seen is that from heat mapping on our homepage right now, the right arrow that moves you to the next group in the carousel is the most click thing we have.

Shomali: The response has been overwhelmingly positive, and Lurie says that enthusiasm started during the project’s earliest quality assurance and testing phase. If you listened to Episode 2—where Chrissy Bagby shared how her association uses the lean startup approach to launch new products—you’ll recall how essential it is to get a prototype into the hands of users early. For AGU, doing that didn’t just validate the concept. It created champions.

Lurie: So we would just go to individuals within our testing groups and within our council, and then within our board. and we would meet one on one with them, and it was the easiest meeting, because all we would say is, we’re building this recommendations engine. Here’s a quick sketch of how it works. And here are the results it recommends for you personally. here are the articles it recommends for you. Give us a sense between one and 5. How relevant are these, and how valuable are they to you? Are these things you would want to read, or you have already read similarly with the connections. Do you know these people? Yes, this is, you know, a postdoc that worked in my lab. This is someone that I wrote a paper with. This is someone that I’ve done research with. So the score that we got out of the proof of concept on average, for relevance and accuracy, I believe, was a 94% for a proof of concept. That’s, you know phenomenally we were very excited, but what we also noticed was that the people who saw this immediately recognized the value and started volunteering as champions. and they said, how can I help you bring this to the membership? I’m coming to annual conference. Can I wear a t-shirt or a PIN? Can I talk to people and promote it so honestly. It was probably the easiest socialization I’ve ever done on a tech project, and I’ve been doing them for a very long time…. So really, it was about making sure the value is front and center. It’s not about the technology. It’s about how this is helping our membership and giving them essentially what they asked for, which is access to relevant content and connecting them with the right people at the right time.

Shomali: The content and connection recommendations are just the beginning of the product’s capabilities. From the start, AGU treated the project as an evolving initiative—always returning to the core strategic question: what will bring the most value to our members?

That question led to two new applications of the technology since its launch in November 2024. The first: using the recommendation engine to personalize the annual conference experience for attendees.

Lurie: Then, the week before our annual conference, where we had 31,000 people, every single attendee got an individually personalized email that said, Here are the 5 sessions you should go to, based on your research. Here are the 5 people that are going to be on site with you that you probably want to get together with, because their research is very similar to yours. That was really where the rubber hit the road I can share with you. We sent 3 of those emails, they each had different content. The second one we sent. we actually did an AI generated subject line. So instead, the 1st email said, recommendations for your agu. 24 experience the second one said sessions. You want to attend on plate tectonics. The open rate on the second email was 90% 20 points higher than the generic subject line. So the click through rate was 26%. And the people who click through on average click through more than 4 times, so they would click one link and then click another and then click another and then click another on average. So the performance of this email, just kind of blew everything else out of the water. And we realized very quickly, not only is that personalization effective for communication and marketing. it was even more effective with our students and early career folks. Their numbers were generally 10 to 12 points higher than our mid to senior folks with respect to response and engagement. So if we talk about having difficulty reaching those populations really hyper, personalized, relevant communication still works.

Shomali: The second spin-off came in response to real-time changes affecting AGU members. As federal policy and workforce changes drastically impacting their members’ work, AGU is using the product to help.

Lurie: 18% of our membership is government funded. We have lots of members from NOAA National Weather Service, United States Geological Survey National Science Foundation, NASA. Those are all organizations we partner closely with. And they’re losing a lot of people we want to help. So how do we do that? The 1st thing we’re doing is using our similarity matching to try and recommend Grant and funding opportunities. So we’re partnering with an organization that aggregates foundation, federal, State, and local grants. We can take the prospectus of that grant and compare it to our members. And then, if their research has a high similarity match, we can recommend it to them and say, Hey, here’s a place you might be able to get some funding.

Shomali: Additionally, AGU is working on utilizing the matching capabilities of the technology to match scientists affected by recent federal layoffs to available positions in the private sector.

Lurie points out that not every association would benefit from the specific technology tool that AGU is using – but that doesn’t mean that their members won’t benefit from personalization.

Whatever tool you use, AGU’s story can help inspire your association in it’s own journey of providing the right tools and connections to not only help its members, but stay relevant to the next generation of the workforce.

That’s it for this episode of Association RevUP. Throughout this second season, we’ll be hearing from associations who are utilizing business to drive their mission forward. Episodes are brought to you by VPC Inc, the production company behind PAR’s in-person event, the RevUP Summit. Check in with their team the next time you need production support at your annual event – VPC will be back with PAR in Annapolis in 2025 for our RevUP Summit as we “Take Care of Business,” the newly announced theme.

And, my thanks to the PAR Pathway Partners: Association business development is changing rapidly and the Pathway PARtners share PAR’s commitment to association business. Learn more about MCI, Popshap, Matchbox, Swapcard, Multiview, and Yes & on our website.

PAR is a member community – join us! Until then,I’m your host, Carolyn Shomali, and I’ll see you next time.