Category Archives: Associations

Customizing for New Members

Posted on by David
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Michelle Frisque is thinking and writing about how to reinvent the American Library Association as part of a pilot course about inventing Library 2.0. Every association should be so lucky as to have members like Michelle, Michael, Jenny and others who are dedicated to their profession and will blog about how the association could best serve them and their peers.

Michelle also mentioned one of my articles in another post, which made my day!

Michelle recently wrote about how the ALA web site could do a better job of serving new members:

ALA is a huge organization. I remember when I first joined I found it very confusing. How do you get involved? What is ALA doing that affects me? What will my membership in ALA do for me? How do I network? None of this is easy to find on the Web site.

Something I got from Michelle’s post is the idea of customizing your association home page for new members. Help them discover the organization by highlighting information, services and opportunities on the home page when that new member is logged in. Change it every week or every day! You can phase out the special content over time or allow the member to turn it off when they no longer need it. It should be fairly evergreen content, which is great because it is relatively easy to manage once it is developed.

A few other ideas: Provide the same content in an RSS feed! Create a serial e-mail autoresponder for new members that gives them a new tip about the association every day for two week after they join! You get the idea.

(A serial e-mail autoresponder is an e-mail announcement list where all the messages are written and queued up so that a new subscriber gets each message in order at a specified interval. These have been around a long time but I’ve never heard of an association using them, oddly enough. Seems like a natural for a lot of association promotions and content.)

Someone You Should be Reading: John Robb

Posted on by David
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John Robb has been blogging for the past couple of years about “the intersection of terrorism, infrastructure and markets.” I’ve been following John’s stuff since he was the CEO at Userland and was leading discussions about knowledge blogging. Many of the trends he discusses about warfare and terrorism have much applicability to self-forming groups and how they may impact associations. Hopefully that won’t involve a rogue committee bombing the electrical lines to your headquarters, however.

I suggest you add his blog, Global Guerrillas, to your subscription list.

AMS-CMS Integration Audio Download

Posted on by David
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You may recall that I did an audio conference a couple weeks ago with Wes Trochlil on the potential and pitfalls of integration association and content management systems. The session was very well received by our attendees at the live event.

I am pleased to now make the program available as a download: Understanding the Potential (and Pitfalls) of Integrating CMS and AMS Systems Audio Product. For $99 you will receive an MP3 file of the audio and a PDF of the slides. A sample of the audio is available in this post.

And here is a special one week offer to my blog readers: use this code when you buy the product and get 40% off! This code will be good until one week from today (May 24, 2006). Enter this code in the shopping cart to receive your discount: V823R4E1 Please feel free to share the code with anyone you think might benefit from this unique program.

Learn more about the audio program.

http://www.audioblog.com/playweb?audioid=P31bc3801ea0660e0757bb7158480fa6eYF97SlREYmN2&buffer=5&fc=FFFFFF&pc=CCFF33&kc=FFCC33&bc=FFFFFF&brand=1&player=ap21

An Unconference for Association Executives

Posted on by David
7

Ben has some concerns about how an unconference for associations executives could work.

I love the hallway track. The pictures, though, got me thinking deeper about unconferences. Look how few people are in those rooms! Because there are so few people around the table, and because they’re opting into rooms around a topic of interest, I also get the feeling that they had a lot in common in terms of the problems and issues they grapple with. In short, they have a high degree of shared context — those rooms are high context environments.

I keep thinking about an unconference for the association community. But it’s becoming clear to me that it probably wouldn’t work. I don’t share enough context with professionals in government relations, public relations, education, etc. to truly provide value to them, or get value from them in a high context environment.

One of the commonalities among the unconferences going on is that they typically have a high-level focus of some sort that will attract the right audience to discuss that set of issues. I get the feeling that Ben is envisioning ASAE’s annual meeting with all the topical structure stripped away. This isn’t how I’ve been looking at it. I think the traditional annual meeting format is the complete antithesis of an unconference. It is too huge of a content tent. There has to be some focus around which to gather people.

One possible idea: How about an Association 2.0 unconference as a grass-roots event? Find some donated space, put together a blog, and get people talking about how associations can increase member participation beyond the limitations imposed by the traditional models?

One CMS to Rule Them All?

Posted on by David
2

A couple of good posts this month on whether a single CMS can be used to manage both your public and intranet web sites. Short answer: usually, no. For more detail follow the links.

I agree with those authors that more often than not, a single CMS will not be appropriate for your public site and your intranet site. The requirements for each are going to be pretty different once you get past basic authoring and content management features. Even for associations, whose public web sites could be considered more intranet-like than the usual corporate web site, are going to be hard pressed to find a single tool that effectively supports both.

Dabble DB Demo Blows Away Meeting Industry Functionality

Posted on by David
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This seven minute demo of the Dabble DB web application should put the fear into conference web site providers. In a mere seven minutes, they take a comma-delimited file of session information and create a highly usable web interface for searching, displaying and modifying the data. Seven minutes! And to make it worse (or better, depending upon your point of view), the Dabble DB is for working with any data, not specifically meetings.

Usability failure is eventually going to be the death of many companies serving the association space. The barriers to entering the web application market are so low that the current players’ interfaces aren’t going to cut it for much longer.

(Via Paul Bissex.)

RSS for Associations, AMS-CMS Integration Event

Posted on by David
2

I have posted the full text of the RSS for Associations article that was published in Association Forum of Chicagoland‘s Forum Magazine this month.

Also, I wanted to remind you that the Understanding the Potential (and Pitfalls) of Integrating CMS and AMS Systems event is being held next Thursday. This is one of the few places to learn about the somewhat tricky topic of creating value for your association by integrating your data and content management systems. Register today!

Slideuments

Posted on by David
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Garr Reynolds has good advice on why you should avoid creating slideuments for your presentations.

Slides are slides. Documents are documents. They aren’t the same thing. Attempts to merge them result in what I call the “slideument” (slide + document = slideument). Much death-by-Powerpoint suffering could be eliminated if presenters clearly separated the two in their own minds before they even started planning their talks.

Projected slides should be as visual as possible and support our point quickly, efficiently (good signal-to-noise ratio), and powerfully. The verbal content, the verbal proof, evidence, and appeal/emotion comes mostly from our spoken word. Our handout (takeaway document) is completely different. We aren’t there to supply the verbal content and answer questions so we must write in a way that provides at least as much depth and scope as our live presentation.

He has a very good point about how a lot of conferences create a dynamic that encourages slideumentation.

Martin for ASAE Scoble

Posted on by David
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Ben Martin wrote an April fools post about how he had just been hired as ASAE & the Center’s membership evangelist and would be blogging for them full time.

It is with equal parts excitement and sadness that I announce that I’ll be leaving my current job to join the staff of ASAE & The Center for a newly created position: Member Evangelist. It seems this little blog and my unmatched enthusiasm for the CAE has gotten more than a little attention over on Eye Street, and after a couple of interviews with Susan Sarfati and John Graham, they have made an offer I simply can’t refuse. My primary duties will be blogging on a new official ASAE & The Center blog, implementing a video podcast featuring members (e-mail me if you’d like to be among the first members interviewed) and ASAE staff, and undertaking a word of mouth member outreach campaign. I start May 1, so I’ll continue blogging here until that date, but of course, a condition of my employment is that I don’t maintain a personal blog about the CAE or Association Management or the Association Management industry. So, goodbye — and hello!

As someone commented on his post, I wish it were true! Hiring a Scoble-like person for ASAE is probably the best idea I’ve heard for them in a long time. Despite their best efforts, I think ASAE still has a transparency problem, and I’m actually in the governance. Ben would be a great person to help with that issue in that kind of role.

RSS for MS CRM

Posted on by David
2

Microsoft just released some sample code with which to create RSS feeds from Microsoft CRM. I think this is a great development and provides a lot of value to users of the product. Being able to subscribe to a feed for a particular person, or class of persons, in a CRM database allows you to track them within your existing tools rather than having to remember to login to a portal page or application.

In fact, I talk about RSS for association management systems in an article I wrote for Forum Magazine that should be out in the April issue. Below is an excerpt of the bit about adding RSS to AMS:

I believe that the potential of RSS as a communication and productivity tool is just beginning to be fully explored. In addition to continuing to use it share and raise awareness of web-based content, I believe that RSS can be put to use in strengthening the relationship between a member and her association.

One use specific to the association market is around increasing member awareness. Take the common scenario of an association staffer who manages a committee or board and serves as an ex officio member of the group. What if your association management system provided an RSS feed for each member, providing updates every time something new happens with that member. You could then subscribe to the feed of each member on the committee and be immediately updated when they register for a conference, renew their membership, buy a product or miss an important continuing education deadline. Imagine the value of being fully aware of your committee members’ individual interactions with the association in a way that comes directly to your desktop rather than you having to mine your AMS on a daily basis to find the same information.

The same kind of feed could be exposed to your members, secured with their user name and password. This feed could alert them when a product they purchased from you ships, deadlines to renew membership or continuing education credits, etc. This would allow them to be much more aware of what your association is doing for them on a daily basis without having to take overt steps to find it out.

This kind of awareness raising could improve the experience for everyone in the association by making better use of the data that flows through your systems on a daily basis to strengthen the relationship between members and the association.

(Via Scoble.)