A few days ago, a SIPA member asked on the discussion forum for alternate revenue strategies from the event success they're having. Here are five that I've previously written about in the Daily. Click to see the full article.

Sell premium licenses (and key data). An extension of Money-Media's Financial Advisor IQ (FA-IQ), ThinkTank provides asset managers a free forum to publish and share their thought leadership and white papers with financial advisors, their primary audience. Money-Media won second place SIPAward in Best Lead Generation/Nurturing Campaign for the growth that ThinkTank provided. Each time a ThinkTank visitor reads a piece of content, that person is stored as a lead for the respective publisher, but publishers can't access the data without paying for the upgrade. "Dozens of companies" are interested in upgrading to premium in order to unlock access to the data on their account. That data includes hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of leads from the platform. Read more.

Hold free virtual sessions for lead generation. Copyrightlaws.com holds free Zoom On Ins—20-minute live video sessions on a popular copyright topic that Lesley Ellen Harris conducts virtually. Testing the market, they put on six of these meetings from Jan. 10-28 and added many new names to their mailing list and eventually some did sign up for paying courses. Copyrightlaws probably can't continue at that pace—6 in 18 days—but with as many as 140 people signing up for a Zoom On In, they have found a good formula to build their audience. "It's another way for us to get amplified," said Harris. "Someone on the call will tell one or two colleagues to sign up for the next one." Harris uses Zoom, so people can see everyone else in the "classroom." People can also join by audio—if they don't want to see everyone or be seen. Read more.

Survey your audience (and offer incentives). It all started with an end-of-year survey they do every year, said marketing manager Karolina Tarczynska for Simplify Compliance's Argosy Group. The first year they got about 800 responses, then over 1100 and this year about 840 so far. They use a prize of a free ticket to one of their events as an incentive for filling it out. "We ask our entire list what new topics they want us to cover, and we'll use that to create new publications, webinars and events." More research, one-on-one discussions with clients and a competitor analysis led to the launch of Family Office Connect, which took place on Oct. 23, 2017, in New York. They received 358 applications to attend, more than double what they had expected. Read more.

Design a specific online course. Columbia Books & Information Services designed an in-person and online training course for nonprofit board members of one of their customers, the Military Officers Association of America. They held several meetings with them to determine the exact format, topics and materials that would be needed for the course. It was determined that a hybrid live and virtual on-demand training would be the best fit. "The live training was scheduled for the morning before the annual board meeting to ensure proper financial knowledge leading into board meeting and set a tone of responsibility," wrote Linnae O'Flahavan, education program manager for CBIS division Association Trends. Originally created for MOAA, it was later adapted into various online formats to serve other Association Trends customers. The course's three modules teach board members about their fiscal roles and critical financial information. Read more.

Create sponsored quizzes. "We set goals for our first year that included number of sponsorships, percentage of quiz completions, percentage of people completing the quiz filling out the registration form and becoming a lead, and overall leads generated," wrote Dave Rosenzweig, product manager, Education Week Press. "In each of these areas, we exceeded our goals including nearly 90% quiz completions and around 60% of people completing the quiz filling out the registration form." They launched the quizzes in spring of 2017 using a 3-month sponsorship model with 8-10 questions per quiz. The product's success moved them to a 1-month sponsorship model as they were able to hit their "lead targets more quickly than anticipated." Sponsors get their logo on the start page, branding opportunities on the quiz pages and a big "Find Out More" button after the quiz has been completed. Read more.

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Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 and SIIA in 2013 as editorial director…