Eight years ago, I got an email from someone who had read a message I had posted on an association executive list serve, offering to produce a custom leadership magazine–an audio magazine–that sounds like a 45 minute show on NPR….
Ever been in a meeting, got all excited about a new project, and then the air goes out of the room when you look to see how much available capital you have to fund a good idea?
What if I told you that a load a venture capital can be had for new projects and that […]
After decades of attending and holding banquets, centerpieces are always notable for their expense, distraction, interest or absence.
Focused on centerpieces at banquets since it was an office discussion today. Dilemma of what can hold up the Beatles CDs that will be our convention banquet centerpieces. Routinely try to do unique things around a theme … for a low expense. (Would rather spend money on instructors or the food.) Inexpensive things we’ve found: a) going off season to a souvenir shop in that area and buying discount items related to the location (toy lobsters, carved/painted sea figures, lanterns) - $6-$9/table; b) medium-sized potted plants such as cactus with something painted on pots - $5/table; c) glass jars/vases from a dollar store filled with Oreo cookies and black/white ribbon tied around the top (black/white event) - $7/table; d) unique boxes of different designs/shapes - $6-8/table; e) carved animal figures - $9/table; f) small state or U.S. flag on holder- $4/table; g) dollar store, party or craft store items - $1-$4/table; h) pottery on clearance - various sizes and types - $12/table. Battery-operated flowers that danced every time someone made noise was not the best idea (loud) but attendees really enjoyed them. Ask the facility if they have anything no cost to use - sometimes other groups leave things behind. (We don’t bring anything back.) Whatever you select needs to be large enough to look like a centerpiece.
Once again, I find myself tending to my social media responsibilities for VAR late at night in the comforts of the master bedroom at the *opulent* Martin Estate.
So, I’ve been digging through Google blog search results for a few of VAR’s domains and have left a number of comments on some recent posts. On gut instinct, I stopped leaving comments on any posts made more than 30 days ago.
Why?
Blogs are conversations, right? So if a blogger said something about VAR over a month ago, I think it would be weird to comment on it now. It would be like jumping back into a conversation that has moved on to another subject or has ended. Do you agree?
Here is my dilemma: The conversation has been going on for far longer than I’ve been employed by VAR. I want to be involved. But I also want to make sure bloggers know that I “get it.” If someone comments on something I posted over a month ago, my first thought is, “Where were you X months/years ago?” My sensitivity is raised if the person commenting is doing so on behalf of a company or organization. And now I’m THAT GUY!
So, especially for you bloggers and members: If you blog about a company or association, do you think there is a period during which a representative of the company or association should respond to demonstrate that they’ve actually been paying attention? Are you turned off by organizational reps who respond to posts about the organization months after the original post? Is there any grace extended if the person is new on staff?
All I have to go on is my gut feeling. Need some help here!
Tagged: Association Management Associations blogging blogs CAE Certified Association Executive commenting comments
Date: September 13, 2007
Time: 8:30 - 10:30 am
Location: Association Forum on The River
Our goal is discuss social media and explore the unconference format. This introduction to the not-even-close-to ubiquitous Unconference event, begins with an introduction by the organizer re-articulating the purpose, format, guidelines and topics. Attendees then gather around white wall and pull topics to discuss (gathered from blog comments and topics addressed that morning) in satellite groups. Attendees are then encouraged to participate at table conversation that discuss one of the selected topics that pique their interest. Attendees are free to roam about, hoping from table to table. This session will be broken into segments based on the activity of the discussions. We will allocate 2 hours for this mini-unconference.
Potential topics* of discussion are:
We encourage people interested to post their own questions to the blog to seed the session with their own interests.
*A similar unconference that took place in D.C with these initial topics.
Bloglines has a new beta version. I adore Bloglines for its fantastic mobile interface. I actually read a lot of my blogs on my cell phone (yes, I do have 20/20 vision). Just in case you want to know what I think of the new Bloglines beta, here are the comments I sent in for feedback:
Like where you’re heading with this. A few suggestions…
1. The new font face makes it difficult to discern between bold and normal emphasis.
2. The feeds could be spaced closer together in the tree.
3. I’m not sure I like the new READ checkbox feature. Items aren’t marked “read” until you click in the reading pane.
4. In IE7, the links don’t show up in the status bar when you hover the mouse over a link.
Tagged: Association Management; Associations; CAE; Certified Association Executive
He looked like a thug.
You know… the angry young man you wouldn’t want to meet alone in an alley at night.
I was at the mall and saw a candy kiosk in the center of the aisle. It had three shelves of various treats in bubblegum-type dispensers.
A young mother approached the candy machines and told her son […]
(bmart, here you go!)
So I just finished reading Decision to Join, the major research study into why people join associations, which updated a similar but much smaller study done in the eighties. As you can imagine, this was a really thrilling read, full of plot points and big surprises - oh wait, sorry, that was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (great book, btw, if you’re into wizards and muggles and things.) Anyway I digress. I am not trying to minimize what I am sure is a very important study. I personally am not a big fan of data - which goes against what Seven Measures tells us about the most successful associations. To me, data is about the past, not the future. But I am happy to be proved wrong as I go along.
As I was reading, though, it struck me that a lot of the findings are very much in line with what my associations’ members have told us. Granted, I am lucky in that we reorganized from a separate Society, Training Institute and Foundation into a Center which encompasses everything under its umbrella - so in the five years it took to undergo this reorganization, my members looked at all the issues about retention, purpose, value in the field, etc. that this study looks at. But looking at DTJ, I was bemused, in particular, by the big deal made of the “statistically significant” difference between members joining for personal benefit and members joining for the benefit of the field. On the one hand, I know nothing about statistics. So you tell me that the difference between 3.4 mean importance index (personal) and 3.6 mean importance index (field) is statistically significant, well, alright, if you say so; doesn’t seem like that different to me, but you’re the expert… But what I do know, is that our members have told us repeatedly that they join as much for helping to advance the field as for the social/professional/CE/direct benefits. So yes, I definitely agree with those findings, even if they don’t seem like that much of a surprise.
There’s a ton of common sense stuff in here, too. I think the point is that these things we think we know are now “proved” - at least statistically and for right now. So the finding that people at different stages of their career need different things from their associations; that members who are more involved are more likely to recommend the association to others; that people drop memberships when they don’t feel they are getting value for money - these things are pretty obvious. No-one will be surprised to see them validated.
What I would have liked to have seen in the book is a lot more discourse - or even open-ended questions - about the small but interesting things that were NOT expected. For example - there’s a question (4.17) about how important certain benefits are compared to others for members involved at the governance level, committee level, ad hoc level and not actively involved. There appears to be a large difference between the perceptions of those at the top than the rank-and-file. This disproves the idea that the governance level people can represent the rest of the membership and act for them - maybe they don’t even know what the membership is really thinking. This definitely resonates with me, because there is definitely a perception that the group at the top of my association is a closed club (intensified by the hierarchical nature of any medical field), and we’re very actively and publicly trying to figure out how to break down those perceived barriers. I would have liked to read more analysis of this question.
Another one (5.8) was about how apparently the youngest age group do NOT show themselves to prefer new technologies for getting information from their associations, ranking “magazines and journals” over e-newsletters, websites, internet etc. I think this question is hugely significant, since we’re all wrestling with the question of how we balance print and online marketing, which vehicles are better for what, etc. We also want to know how to attract more new members - i.e. tap into the younger generations who maybe don’t know about us yet. But there was barely a tiny paragraph about this in DTJ.
I’ll leave it here. I’m sure I’ll come back to this study, probably more than once, and I do plan to attend the DTJ conference (October 29) at which I hopefully will be able to ask some of these things of the authors, but bottom line, I actually think that the potential of this study is nowhere near realized yet. I think it will be when all or most of the associations who are members of ASAE choose to undertake the study with their own members and input their data back in, when the numbers of respondents swell from 16k to 100k+, and when we can leave aside the common sense stuff and really delve into some of the secondary issues, that this study will really be useful.
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