Peggy Hoffman is president of Mariner Management & Marketing LLC, an association management company.  She twitters at @peggyhoffman and blogs at the Idea Center.

So what do with all the what-if’s and great ideas left-over from 2009 as we look ahead to 2010? As I am wont to do this time of year, I look back at my “great ideas for the new year” list and figure out which ones I captured, those I missed and those I dismissed. Then I build my list for the new year. This time around – at least on the association side I have plenty to consider thanks to ASAE’s Acronym challenge to the association-sphere. Their Big Ideas Month challenge has generated dozens of blog postings and ideas listed in one compilation. You can read them all through Acronym archives.

Last year, some of my inspiration also came from Acronym. Stephanie Vance’s post Get One Idea Going put webinars on my great ideas list, while Stopping the Silo Effect by Katie Paffhouse helped me put a couple of communication ideas on my list.

But it was Shannon Otto’s posting that got me asking the question: So what do with all the what-if’s and great ideas left-over from 2009 as we look ahead to 2010?

All the ideas have merit, many of them have potential, but alas few will be acted on unless we make a commitment. The challenge is to shift through all the ideas to find the one or two that really resonate with your organization and for which there are passionate champions.

Whether it’s this set of ideas or a set generated from within your own association, now is the time to commit to action. Not on all the ideas, but on the one or two that make sense. Identifying those can be as simple as gathering staff and volunteers around in a room for a free-flowing discussion on all the options with the end goal of winnowing the list to just one or two. Then give free rein to the most enthusiastic champions to act.

What would be interesting would be for ASAE to go through the same process using the list generated through the challenge. They would be an incubator for the couple of ideas garnering the most enthusiasm from a cadre of staff and ASAE members.

With the big ideas at hand, let’s throw out the challenge to act.

PS — Read my What If on volunteer programs.