Category Archives: Associations

Understanding the Potential (and Pitfalls) of Integrating CMS and AMS Systems

Posted on by David
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Ever wondered if you should integrate your association management system with your web content management system? Everyone says you should but have you really evaluated the benefits and costs of doing so?

If the answer to that question interests you, then join me and Wes Trochlil for an online event about AMS-CMS integration: Understanding the Potential (and Pitfalls) of Integrating CMS and AMS Systems. This is a must attend event if you are contemplating integration or are not happy with your current situation.

This event is a 90 minute online seminar on April 27, with pre and post activities in an online community for participants. The first 10 registrants will get one free hour of remote consulting with either Wes or myself. Those first spots won’t last long, so act quickly!

The Permeable Nonprofit

Posted on by David
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Here is an interesting essay from Nonprofit Online News: The Permeable Nonprofit

People Support Causes, Not Tax-Exempt Corporations

Organizations could respond to this assault on their boundaries with policies of control, as many did with email and are trying to do with blogging, were it not for some critical facts: The people who are in these new networks are their people. The issues being taken up by these networks are their issues. The passion that is driving these networks is the passion they were counting on.

This fits well with some of the ideas I discussed in my Association 2.0 article.

(Via World Changing.)

Paperless Conferences

Posted on by David
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Ben Martin has pointed out that ASAE & the Center Annual Meeting will be going paperless this year, which was a rather last minute decision by ASAE. It was pretty obvious that paperless is much preferred, in general, by attendees after they did a paperless meeting at the Technology Strategy & Solutions conferences and then followed that up immediately by a papered Great Ideas conference.

I much prefer not having a bunch of paper to lug around then throw out in the hotel room because I can’t bear to add it to my load of stuff to carry home.

Now they just need to get rid of the speakers. 🙂

Untracking

Posted on by David
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In conversations I’ve had with association people (mostly in blogs so far) there seems to be agreement that doing a full-blown unconference is a tough sell to conference organizers.

In thinking about that, I wonder if an untrack would be a good first step (this idea first came up when I was discussing unconferences with Ben Martin). An untrack would essentially be an add-on to an existing conference. The organizers would set aside at least two rooms that have defined time slots and a theme but no set agenda other than that. The conference would kick-off by having people collaboratively develop session topics and leading them as described by Dave Winer yesterday.

The main benefit to an untrack is that I could see an association, typically very risk averse orgs, going for that as an experiment within an existing conference more readily than creating a brand new meeting as an unconference. Just because it is easier to sell doesn’t mean it is the best thing to do, however.

Could this work? I really don’t know if having the unstructured next to the structured would benefit either or degrade them both, or let one win over the other. Someone will have to try it and see.

Blogging Elsewhere Lately

Posted on by David
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It’s been a little quiet on the High Context blog lately, largely because I have been posting to two other blogs the past couple of weeks. Check out We Have Always Done It That Way and the Great Ideas Conference blogs for some of stuff I have been writing recently.

I’ll be out in San Diego this coming week for the ASAE Great Ideas conference. Be sure to say ‘Hi’ to me if you read this blog!

RSS TV

Posted on by David
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Shawn Lea has posted a list of innovations that hotels are probably going to implement over the next few years.

One thing not on the list that they could do pretty much immediately for meetings is to create an RSS Channel that displays recent entries from an RSS feed designated by the meeting organizers.

If you’ve gone to enough meetings you are probably familiar with the hotel tv channel that provides information about the day’s events, which is usually out-of-date and/or redundant to material you already have in print sitting on your bedside table. Not very useful. A TV channel that scrolled RSS entries created by the organizers would be much more compelling and timely and might even be watched. You could even have a podcast voice-over if you wanted to take it a step further.

It should be incredibly simple to manage something like this. Just point the system at the RSS feed for the event blog (you are event blogging your meetings, right?). Boom, all set.

To whatever industry that provides hotel tv systems, get on the RSS bandwagon!

Ben gets del.icio.us

Posted on by David
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Ben Martin on how he has used the del.icio.us social bookmark service with his association’s volunteers to replace the traditional resource guide authoring process:

So, who writes these resource guides? Well, in my experience the links are harvested by association staff and/or volunteers, who also compose short descriptions for the sites they collect. They then write up the guides in MS Word, hand them over to a webmaster, who codes it into HTML and uploads it to the Web site. Then, the resource guide gathers dust on a static page. Perhaps it gets updated next year. Perhaps not.

Friends, there is a better way!

I agree that traditional resource guides, as traditionally authored, are inevitably stale and not too useful by the time they are published. The key to the approach that Ben describes is to trust your members to collaborate without an editorial filter. Upside: current, relevant, member-driven conent! Downside: letting go of the illusion of control. Hmm, maybe that is an upside too…

Burritobility

Posted on by David
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I thought I would share an example I used in the Web Site Usability Workshop that I conducted with Dave, Frank and Joanna earlier this week at the ASAE Tech conference.

I started off by asking anyone in the room who likes burritos to raise their hand. 90 out of the 100+ people in the room shot their hand up. I had the right crowd!

What is the number one thing a freshmex burrito restaurant chain’s web site should do? Get you into one of their restaurants to buy a burrito. Simple enough.

Now, go look at BajaFresh.com. The store locator has a convenient search box right at the top to put in your address or zip code and find the closest store. Simple and effective.

Now go to the Chipotle.com web site. Look out for the flying burrito zeppelin! What is that spinning tomato/tortilla chip/hot pepper thingy doing in the middle of the page? How can I find a store? No way to tell without mousing over the chip and then futzing with an animated menu with no labels displayed by default. The only plain text link on the home page is to the privacy policy. (For once, a lawyer has a positive usability impact on a web site design!)

Both sites have a store locator feature. Only BajaFresh makes it easy to find and use that key functionality.

I asked the people in the room, “Who has the more usable site?” Answer: “BajaFresh!”

Then I asked, who probably paid more for their web site? “Chipotle!”

A usable burrito site doesn’t have to be an expensive one.

The lessons here include:

  • A great product can be undone by poor usability;
  • Usability can be a competitive advantage if your site makes it easier to do business with you;
  • If your product is sub-par, making it usable alone won’t help much;
  • Flying burrito zeppelins are kind of distracting.

ASAE Technology Strategies and Solutions Conference

Posted on by David
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We have wireless access at ASAE’s tech meeting that kicks off today, so hopefully I’ll be able to post a few blog entries from on site this week. In fact, I’m posting this from the opening session via the toll wireless at the Reagan Building in DC.

If you are at the meeting, I’ll be speaking in the Web Site Usability workshop and the Web Management session. Should be good stuff. The management session will deal with how to manage the politics of web design and management within an association, a tough issue that most people have challenges with.