Category Archives: Associations

Give Me Unified Login or Give Me Death!

Posted on by David
7

A question came across the ASAE Technology Section list this week about how to manage multiple logins for a variety of web-based services offered to members of an association. I chose to deliver a bit of a rant rather than a direct answer. I’ve posted my note below:

I think the time has come where any serious vendor in the association market should support authentication from another system for their product and associations should begin to demand it.

As others have posted, this level of integration is relatively easy to achieve via web services. Sure, each association/system will have its quirks that may require some tweaking but the basics are well defined.

Hostile user/login management systems immediately cripple your ability to create member value on the web. We, as an industry, shouldn’t tolerate it any longer.

I think that people these days are willing to create a new login for organizations/companies that they interact with and receive value from. One login. Unless the value you provide is incredibly high, most will not be happy to create multiple logins for just you and many will not bother. Vendors take note: you’ll be at an increasingly greater competitive disadvantage the longer you fail to support external authentication mechanisms in your services and products.

Association Glogging

Posted on by David
Reply

I am participating in two group blogs (glogging?) at the moment.

One is the Great Ideas Conference Blog, developed in conjunction with ASAE’s Great Ideas conference. It is being written by several folks who will be presenting at the conference in Orlando starting this Sunday.

The other blog is one that I am writing with several association consultant colleagues that we hope to eventually publish as a short book. We’ve Always Done It That Way: 101 Things That Associations Must Change. Our premise is that doing things the same way as you’ve always done it probably isn’t working out too well these days. We are helpfully providing a few changes (101) you might want to consider. Jamie speaks for me in his post about the group of folks we are working with on this.

Conference vs. Unconference

Posted on by David
16

I’ve been thinking lately about how an unconference style event for an association could work. I’ll be posting some ideas on that later on. I thought it would be good to start by comparing the characteristics of conferences and unconferences. So, in no particular or meaningful order, here is my initial list:

Conference Unconference
Attendees Participants
Exhibitors Participants
Recruiting speakers Recruiting participants
Content planning Content facilitation
Direct marketing Word of mouth marketing
Handouts Wikis
12 month planning cycle 12 week planning cycle
Sponsorships Donations
Once a year As often as needed and desired
Large budgets Shoe-string budgets
Maximize value for organizers Maximize value for participants
Best practices Innovation
Top down Bottom up
Wisdom of experts Wisdom of crowds
Magazine coverage 2 months later Live blogging/podcasting
Slides Stories
Panels Conversations
Best practices Practicing
Hierarchy Networks
Directive methods participatory methods
Participants Contributors/creators
Speakers Conversation starters
Sharing information Learning collaboratively
Instruction Discovery
Best learning in the hallway It’s all hallway!

I’m sure a lot more can be added to this but it’s a start.

I also just created a Wikipedia entry for unconference. I was surprised it didn’t exist yet.

Update: Added a couple more items suggested by Rich Westerfield. (I changed Powerpoint to Slides.)

Update 2: Added several more contributed in the comments by Nancy White and Jeff De Cagna. Thanks Nancy and Jeff!

On Marketing and New Conference Models

Posted on by David
1

Rich Westerfield posted recently about how you might use a pay what you feel model for meetings. He raises this point:

But we’re forgetting something:  cash flow.  We often need that early registration cash flow to fund the final mailings and pay for some of the onsite work.  For many small and some mid-sized events, B/E doesn’t happen until the final couple of weeks when 50% or so of registrations are in. 

I think this misses a point about some new models for meetings that are currently evolving: they don’t use traditional marketing. They can’t afford it. These new meeting models focus on word of mouth, attracting opinion setters as early registrants and using lots of social tech (blogs, wikis, etc.). I doubt that the BlogHer conference has done or ever will use a mass paper mailing to attract participants.

You can’t just blow-up one aspect of a meeting and expect to have the rest of it be business as usual. The entire enterprise has to be re-concieved.

Doc Searls has a good article on unconferences, which is a new way of holding meetings and letting the participants drive the content of the event.

I just did a presentation for the KCSAE yesterday and unconferencing was one of the topics I covered. I think there is a lot of potential in this model for associations and I’ll be writing more about it in the near future.

I’m not trying to pick on Rich with this post, he is a constant source of new ideas for meeting marketing. His post just triggered something for me that I wanted to write about. Thanks, Rich!

Boxwood Technology Adds RSS to Job Board Service

Posted on by David
1

Boxwood Technology is pretty much on top of the heap for hosted job board services for associations. (Disclaimer: I was a client of theirs when I worked at ASHA and I serve with Boxwood Chairman John Bell on the ASAE Tech Council.) They have just added RSS feeds to their service, which is a fantastic extension. Now job seekers can subscribe to all new jobs or to the results of a specific search. After they subscribe, any newly posted jobs will appear in their newsreader of choice. Nice! They should mention this service on their web site.

For an example, see ASAE’s job center. There is an orange RSS button at the bottom of the screen.

A couple of improvements I think they could make include:

  • Include an RSS autodiscovery tag in the page markup that will allow people to more easily subscribe with newsreaders that look for the tag.
  • Make the RSS buttom a direct link to the RSS feed rather than a pop-up window (not sure why you would want a pop-up unless they are trying to discourage indexing of the feeds).
  • Add some buttons for easily subscribing via some of the more popular online newsreaders (such as Yahoo!, bloglines, google, etc.).

The 15 Minute Web Plan

Posted on by David
1

I had a call this morning with someone who runs a summer camp talking about how their web site can help their organization. It was a pro bono thing I did for a friend (I have a soft-spot for camps, being a former camp counselor myself). Here is my 15 minute method for developing a plan of action for your web site:

  • Identify the top 2 or 3 objectives your organization has for the next 12 months or so.
    • If you have no formal objectives, make some up. (I’m not kidding. It’s not hard if you know your organization well.)
  • For each objective, identify at least one thing that your web site can contribute to success in that area.
  • Go do them.

Simple but it lets you quickly identify actions you can take that will make a difference. Your planning can get more complex and comprehensive down the road if you feel the need for that but the important thing is to begin doing something, see how it works, and adjust going forward. It also lets you act even if your organization has little in the way of strategic direction at the moment.