Headed to ASAE in Toronto
Peggy Hoffman is president of Mariner Management & Marketing LLC, an association management company. She twitters at @peggyhoffman and blogs at the Idea Center.
Each year several thousand association professionals gather for our time at the ASAE Annual Meeting. This year it runs Aug. 15 to 18 in Toronto, Canada. This is our chance to rub shoulders, to share ideas, to learn, to party – and yes to complain about members and volunteers. There I said it. Members and volunteers are both a blessing and an angst for association professionals – in much the same way as employees and customers are to the corporate world.
The difference is that members and volunteers are the “owners” while customers and employers are, well, resources. And that is a big difference. In the non-profit world we talk about new association models and specifically about for-profit associations. No matter the model, the critical difference remains. Members are the owners and volunteers are the invested owners.
So the question is why do we spend so little time on orienting our owners to the business, particularly the volunteers who we expect to carry a portion of the workload? We do a great job of marketing our events and products to members. A reasonable job of welcoming new members, though often overloading them with information on “benefits.” We build Web sites and communities. We publish. We put on great events. And every year we have an election and install a board of directors.
But can our members and our volunteers recite the mission statement? Can they state the reason the association exists? Will we are renewal notice be on the top of the bill to be paid pile or on the maybe pile?
In Toronto, I know I’m be listening intently not just for how I ramp up my social media strategy or for clever membership promotional strategies, but for how we help members and volunteers be more informed and more engaged owners. That’s the ticket to success in the future.
I’m particularly looking forward to a session on Counter Intuitive Paths to Success: Upending the Status Quo on Sunday led by Jason Della Rocca, formerly executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), an association which lived on the edge along with its members.
If you’re not attending or not an association professional but are a member of some association and want a look at what we talking about, you can follow the show on Twitter at #ASAE09 or via ASAE09’s hub — check it out at http://asae09.org or http://asae09.org/m on your mobile phone.
Tags: ASAE, associations, meetings, Peggy Hoffman
Categories: Uncategorized
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Posted by SmartBriefScoop on August 14th, 2009 at 8:17 am
One of our bloggers gets ready for #ASAE09 in Toronto. Will you be there too?: http://ow.ly/k4ED
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Posted by MemberClicks on August 14th, 2009 at 9:58 am
Great post about @peggyhoffman’s prep for #asae09 on @smartbriefscoop: http://bit.ly/uH31C
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Posted by Acronym on August 15th, 2009 at 3:39 am
Annual Roundup: Getting there…
For those of you who are already in Toronto, welcome! For those of you travelling today, I hope your luggage meets a kinder fate than mine … And for those who aren’t able to be here, you’ll be missed. Before……
Posted by Jeffrey Cufaude on August 18th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
I don’t deny that very often pain is involved, but I think part of the solution might be in reframing what we’re talking about. The choice we need our elected association leaders to make is indeed making investments now in initiatives whose dividends may not be fully realized until they are out of office.
We need to help break the narrow mindset that their success is only measured by what happens during the time they sit at the board table. The long view needs to become a critical part of how they view their decisions. One of the best volunteers I worked with took great pride in going against the grain and committing to an initiative that only years later was embraced by the membership. He would always smile when talking about that with the staff because he knew his efforts helped make it possible.
This comment was originally posted on http://blogs.asaecenter.org/Acronym/)“>Acronym
Posted by Lisa Junker on August 18th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
I really like the idea of reframing "pain" as "investment." The latter is definitely a more powerful, and positive, term, at least to me.
And I like what you’ve said here: "We need to help break the narrow mindset that their success is only measured by what happens during the time they sit at the board table." Could former board leaders become shepherds or stewards of long-term initiatives that began under their watch, without overshadowing new leaders?
This comment was originally posted on http://blogs.asaecenter.org/Acronym/)“>Acronym
Posted by Acronym on August 18th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Living through short-term pain…
I could write 10 blog posts based on Fareed Zakaria’s closing general session speech, but I think to start with I’ll focus on one of his last exhortations to the audience: “We have got to learn to impose short-term pain……