How to Find 5010 NSA Members – Part 1

What if the National Speakers Association wanted to find new members? If they were willing to explore deep into the Invisible Web they would find surprising secrets worth their weight in gold (or, at least, new members willing to pay the membership fees).

It’s no secret that a big challenge for any association these days is attracting young blood and fresh ideas. Like many organizations, the National Speakers Association has the stuff that can put new members on the fast track to success. But, how do you find those new members?

Here’s one of our favorite “Beyond Google” resources. These days we don’t go far without logging into ZoomInfo.com’s PowerSearch. Yes, it does cost a little money, but let’s see if we could put it to the test and find some likely contacts who might help the NSA grow its membership.

If you’d like to find new young members, a logical place to start would be colleges and universities. Professors of speech might be great partners in the membership drive. These professors teach the subject and likely have career oriented students.

ZoomInfo’s PowerSearch barely has to dust off its search options in order to deliver. In the picture at the beginning of this article we can see that it’s possible to choose a “job title” of “speech,” an “industry” category of “education” and a further subcategory of “colleges and universities.”

Just like magic we get 460 results listing professors from Alma College to York University. The listings include professors with job descriptions like:

• • Professor, Voice and Speech
  • Professor of Speech and Communication
  • Professor, Drama and Speech Communications
  • Instructor of Speech and Theatre

“Professor of Speech Communication” seems to be the most prevalent listing, but clearly the other titles listed above also fit the bill.

There were also a lot of listings for professors of “Speech Pathology” – which is not what we were looking for. There were also listings for “speech therapists,” and again, they are not our target.

Reaching back into our “Boolean” search abilities (look it up, ok?!) we tried a long shot to see if entering “speech -pathology” would better target our results – but, alas, to no avail.

So we tried one of ZoomInfo’s coolest tools. They offer “instant messaging” with their expert searchers. In seconds I typed out my question – and they told me to use the word “not” as the “Boolean operator” to correctly limit my search.

Back to the drawing board. We typed the entry below into the job title box:

speech not pathology not pathologist not therapist

Big improvement – our 460 results became 340 professors, and mostly the kind of speech professors we were looking for. Almost all had contact information – often even including an email address.

Just ask Google if it could do similar work for you!

We could go on and on about the power of this rather simple research tool. For instance, we can save our targeted list as a “Project.” We can also export this list to an Excel spreadsheet. Nice, huh?

But, what’s the best way to use this raw information? Should we send out an email blast to professors we’ve never met? Do we get on the phone and start calling – starting with “A” for Alma College?

When faced with such important decisions, we often find guidance by remembering the letters “WWSD.” In the next article, we’ll add our secret ingredient to the raw technical data. If you know much about us at all, you’ll know that “WWSD” stands for “What Would Sarah (Michel) Do?”

We’ll answer that in the next article. Stay tuned.

Note: We do not take referral fees from any of sites or resources we talk about in our blogs or workshops. We call ‘em like we see ‘em.