Delivering Value, Efficiency and ROI for ULI Members Speaking to ULI members at the Fall Meeting in San Francisco on Nov. 5, 2009, CEO Patrick Phillips lays out four principles – efficiency, leverage, integration and impact -- that will serve as guideposts for how ULI will measure and promote the value and efficiency we offer to our members.
As members, you have all made investments in ULI. Our job is to ensure an appropriate return on that investment.
How do we do this? Let me start with a couple of observations: First, I believe that members have varying motivations and values. I use my own experience as an example. Early in my career, my focus was on technical knowledge. For me, meetings were less important than publications. As I gained traction in my career, I also gained knowledge. I therefore became active as a creator with ULI, being a speaker, contributing to books, and serving on panels. Later, my job shifted toward building and maintaining important business relationships. First for myself and then for my company. Visibility became important, meetings became paramount.
And while it’s true that ULI is comprised of individuals, not organizations, the sustaining member category gave me the opportunity, as a leader of an organization, to treat ULI membership strategically as an organizational development and professional development tool for my team. Leading and contributing, and continuing to learn from others over the course of one’s career, is the hallmark of ULI.
ULI provides a unique and broad-spectrum window on our industry. Its interdisciplinary nature creates the opportunity to optimize educational and networking values.
My second observation is about adaptation. Last week I attended our inaugural Urban Investment Network Summit in Barcelona. The UIN is a new ULI program comprised of public and private organizations committed to sparking and maintaining a rich dialogue in land use/development issues, primarily in Europe. I heard again and again from participants that ULI uniquely takes this holistic and interdisciplinary approach. It is the strength of this core concept that allows ULI to customize its familiar programmatic elements to seize a particular business and culture of a region. In other words, ULI is an example of a learning organization.
These two insights are important to bear in mind as ULI evolves: the way individual members use ULI and what they value about ULI can change over the course of a career; and our Institute can adapt to new environments without losing sight of our core values.
This kind of organization has to have numerous ways to create and disseminate information. It is up to our members to determine the optimal mix that meets their needs.
In getting to know the organization from the inside, I often have found myself wondering if there isn’t a more general “theory of ULI”, overarching foundational principles to help ensure our effectiveness. I think there are four principles interlock and can serve as guideposts to help us deliver value to you: efficiency, leverage, integration and impact.
First, efficiency. It’s certainly a byword for all organizations that are currently having to do more with less. ULI has to seek a geographic presence that balances where we are now with where we need to be in the future. This applies to the district council level, regions, developing and developed markets alike. ULI’s global demographics monograph published last year notes that by 2030, seven of ten urban dwellers will live in Asia or Africa. We need to clearly think through the implications for ULI, an organization with a global mission.
We have to begin to develop new types of channels to distribute information, especially online channels. We need to build on the substantial investment made in Virtual ULI to make sure that we are responsive and can fully leverage ULI’s content. We also need to begin to harness other existing channels, including social media, on our behalf.
Second, leverage. I think that there are two key aspects of leveraging our work effectively. First, we already have an incredible level of effort from our members across the organization. To sustain it, we have to continually align the interests of the members with opportunities for participation. Right now, we are beginning a member research program that is designed to help us better understand member motivation and value. The critical difference between this and prior efforts is that it is designed to result in an ongoing system, rather than a snapshot.
The second aspect of leverage relates to allies and partnerships. We have seen an explosion of these partnerships in the past few years, and I think that this is based primarily on the currency of ULI’s mission and the quality of our information. Partnerships are continually extending our reach.
At the global level, one example of this is the new ULI Energy Exchange Initiative. It is a web-based, open-access platform for sharing best practices and energy management/conservation strategies. It was completed with a wide range of partners and its future will depend fundamentally on the participation of many partners – individuals and organizations – to sustain a rich database.
At the local level, there are many examples, including one from one of our newest district councils. ULI Nashville’s sustainability committee established an innovative grassroots initiative to sponsor energy retrofits for businesses, institutions and residences in an underserved neighborhood within the city. This effort is highly visible in the community, and it is based on local partnerships.
Third, integration. The initiatives I just mentioned demonstrate one thing that we know very clearly about ULI: there is never a shortage of good ideas. The question is always how to get appropriate priorities established and how to ensure critical connections. Priority-setting has to be both bottom-up and top-down. ULI has re-organized the research program over the past 18 months into a series of centers. It is important to remember that the centers are not silos. One good example of integration is the recent Shaw Forum, which this year focused on federal efforts to stabilize neighborhoods hit by high rates of foreclosures due to the housing collapse. The program involved three centers: the Terwilliger Center, the Rose Center, and the Center for Balanced Development in the West. This is a good example of using a longstanding ULI event, the Shaw Forum, in a new way, combining resources from different centers.
Finally, impact. We’ve reached a distinctive moment in the U.S., where urban and metropolitan issues are far more prominent on the national agenda. Land use is increasingly seen as the bridge between housing, infrastructure, and energy. It is a connection that ULI has helped establish.
We can anticipate increased federal involvement in urban related issues, particularly in the allocation of federal resources to those areas that take a more integrated approach to urban planning and development, an approach long supported by ULI. This process can be fueled by accurate and timely information inserted strategically into the public dialogue. As this process unfolds, there will be many opportunities for ULI to provide this information. Just last month, ULI’s publication Moving Cooler featured prominently in US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood’s testimony before Congress. The recent Priced Out and Bay Area Burden reports are great examples of how we can have a local and regional impact.
Maximizing our impact will require a redesigned communications and outreach function, one that I call a “designed-in” approach, where research and education programs are conceived and executed with communications in mind. This can help us expand our constituencies, with implications for developing a more robust business plan and revenue model, attracting additional foundation support, new partners, and new members.
These four principles – efficiency, leverage, integration and impact -- will serve as guideposts for how we measure and promote the value and efficiency of ULI to our members.
Like all organizations, ULI is adjusting and adapting to new economic and financial realities. Like many of our members, we believe there is opportunity in adversity, an opportunity to create a leaner, more responsive organization that can deliver a relevant and compelling experience to our members.
As I was preparing these remarks, I came across an interview with my predecessor, Rick Rosan. It was published in the May 1992 issue of Urban Land, shortly after Rick had taken the head post at ULI. He had been in office roughly the same amount of time that I have. We faced a very similar economic environment, an industry deeply hit by a severe recession. In the interview, Rick discussed many of the same issues that I touch on here--the need to retain our members by providing value, preserving the high quality of the work, and influencing public policy.
Rick said at the time of the interview, “I am amazed by how many things we’re doing. That’s a part of ULI that does not always come across to members, primarily by ones who attend the ULI Spring and Fall Meetings. It is easy to forget how extensive the educational and research programs are, yet I know the basis for ULI’s strength lies in the fact that these programs are executed so well. When a professional organization does well in those areas, everything else begins to fit together, and that is what is happening in ULI.”
There have been a lot of changes since then at ULI, and there will be more changes to come. But that pursuit of excellence Rick spoke about is a constant. What will never change at our Institute is what matters most. And that is the commitment to quality, to credibility, and to integrity that has long defined the Urban Land Institute.