It’s no coincidence that LifeScience Alley’s membership is multiplying like cells in a Petri dish.
The Minneapolis-based trade association (lifesciencealley.org), which hosts its annual health care and med-tech conference December 8, has signed up more than 120 new member companies in 2010. The total of nearly 650 companies is the highest the group has ever seen, and enough to surpass the country’s two largest life science trade associations, in California (Biocom) and Massachusetts (MassBio). Both have had membership declines in the past two years.
Frank Jaskulke, LifeScience Alley manager of member services, sees more companies wanting to have a voice in legislative discussions because of the slew of actions on that front at both the state and federal level.
But LifeScience Alley also has undergone a culture shift in recent years under its strategic plan, embracing social media and especially LinkedIn, which Jaskulke calls “transformative.” The LifeScience Alley LinkedIn group has 2,400 members and grows by 20 to 25 people per week. The association also changed its language—members are a “community” rather than an “industry”— and emphasizes getting together socially, particularly getting younger members out for affordable ($25) quarterly networking events.
“And this will sound like kind of a simple thing, but we actually started counting how many times we make referrals and what types of referrals,” Jaskulke says. LifeScience Alley has always helped start-up companies find investors, and helped big companies find small-company partners, he says. But now tracking and reporting that data to members is helping them see “tangible value.”
