ISSA, your association for cleaning and facility solutions, has named Laura Craven vice president of marketing and communications, bringing three decades of industry experience to the ISSA leadership team.

Craven arrives from Imperial Brady, formerly Imperial Dade before the merger with Brady PLUS. At Imperial Dade, she spent 22 years building the distributor’s marketing organization from the ground up.

She joined the company when it still operated as Dade Paper and helped grow the brand as it expanded from Florida through the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Northeast regions. When the company became Imperial Dade in 2017, Craven took on the broader marketing mandate for the newly combined organization and built out a team to support it. Before Imperial Dade, she held marketing and supply chain roles at Network Services and HAVI Global Solutions.

Her work went beyond brand-building. As a LEED Accredited Professional and GBAC Trained Technician, Craven worked directly alongside customers to strengthen their sustainability programs, indoor air quality, and occupant hygiene practices—hands-on experience she said was some of the most rewarding of her career.

A 30-year relationship with ISSA

Craven’s ties to ISSA predate her new title by three decades. She traces the relationship back to her first ISSA Show, which she described as an overwhelming introduction to the breadth of products and solutions the industry’s manufacturers offer, and to the community built around them.

Over the last decade, she came to see ISSA as far more than the show. Credentialing and standards, education, charity work, sustainability initiatives, and advocacy all deepened her involvement, she said, and the more involved she got, the more she appreciated what the association does for its members and for the industry at large. Several years on ISSA’s board of directors gave her a closer look behind the scenes, and she said she came away impressed with the staff’s camaraderie and the association’s impact.

Streamlining member value

At ISSA, Craven’s work shifts from helping distributor sales teams move product to communicating the association’s value proposition across all of its member classes. That value proposition, she noted, is already extensive—arguably too extensive. With a large number of member benefits on the menu, she said the challenge isn’t adding more, but helping each member identify the two or three that matter most to their business, wherever they happen to be in it.

Marketing’s job, she said, is to take ISSA’s mission and help each of the association’s nearly 11,000 members zero in on what’s most useful to them today. What’s useful varies by member size, geography, and maturity, she noted—a company just getting started has different needs than one that’s been around for a century—and marketing’s task is to make those distinctions clear, simple, and easy to act on.

Onboarding, personalization and community

Looking ahead, Craven said she’s focused on three priorities: activation, personalization, and community. Early onboarding is critical, she said, whether that means connecting new members with longer-tenured ones in something close to a mentoring relationship or getting them plugged into just one committee, event, or educational opportunity right away. Personalization means making sure members receive the information most relevant to their specific needs rather than a one-size-fits-all stream of updates. And community, she said, is what ties it together, giving members a group of peers they can turn to for advice and recommendations, whether they joined yesterday or three decades ago.

That focus on community echoes a theme Craven said she’s heard repeatedly from members over the years: people don’t stick with an association for the discounts alone. They stay for the relationships and the sense of belonging. ISSA also holds a substantial amount of member data, she noted, and using it to send more personalized, targeted communication will be a key part of marketing’s role going forward—alongside continuing to build the cohort-specific communities the association has developed in recent years, where members can connect with others who share their member class, size, region, or stage of growth.

Communicating with members, not at them

Asked what she hopes members will say about ISSA’s marketing team years from now, Craven said she wants the association to be remembered for communicating with members, not to them, and for making it comfortable and rewarding to be part of. More broadly, she said she hopes members old and new alike come to say ISSA helped their business grow, whether through its resources or its relationships.

“A trade association should help its members thrive,” she said. Bringing that mission to life, in her view, means turning the association’s list of benefits into resources members use—to increase sales, lower expenses, retain employees, or get involved in causes like ISSA’s charitable initiatives.

Advice for members not yet engaged

For members who haven’t tapped into everything ISSA offers, Craven’s advice starts with a single question: “What’s keeping you up at night?”

She said she’s confident that whatever the challenge, ISSA already has a resource that can help—the key is picking one issue, connecting with someone at ISSA or through the member portal, and acting on it.

From there, she said, engagement tends to build on itself: one resource leads to an event, an event leads to an educational opportunity, and members start to see how the association’s offerings connect.