5 ways to transform your team’s brainstorming
Great ideas don’t appear out of thin air. If you want your team to start taking more innovative approaches to solving organizational problems, you may need to change the way you work. The Canadian Society for Medical Laboratory Science (CSMLS) is an association with big dreams but a modest budget. Yet, it has won several […]
How I helped double my association’s income
When I started at the National Campus and Community Radio Association, the English not-for-profit network of radio stations with 105 members across Canada, I came from the member-station side. Not having any knowledge of association and membership management, I was learning on the go. But I knew what my station wanted and needed, and I […]
How we created the biggest membership boom in our association’s history
When we talk about the workforce pipeline — the pool of eligible candidates prepared to take on professional roles in an industry as opportunities open — it’s all about the bigger picture. The industry must find ways to nurture such a pool to avoid a talent shortage in years to come. After all, we’re in […]
Why your association needs to define member engagement
What does member engagement mean to you? Sure, it’s the hot topic that much of our work as association professionals revolves around, but the goal can be obscured by indirect efforts and lack of focus. As a culture consultant, my area of expertise is the internal and external cultures of employees, customers and members. When […]
How to move from silos to success
We live in a silo industry. Do you remember the last time you put heads together with someone from a different department to share ideas about an internal pain point? Do you wish you had opportunities to do it more? Often, working together across disciplines generates insight greater than the sum of its parts. This […]
Should you take your event online?
Online events, specifically hybrid conferences, are enormously powerful. Held synchronously with face-to-face meetings, they can help you broaden your reach by offering content to a new group of people. They also involve technology tools being introduced and refined at wildly fast speeds. There is little consistency across organizations when it comes to structure, pricing and […]
6 lessons I learned from listening to partnership professionals
We can learn a lot from listening. When you are looking for guidance, searching for inspiration or hoping to educate yourself, it is a valuable and worthwhile enterprise to listen to the voices in your professional community. The DC-Area Partnership Professionals Network (DC-PPN) is a group of association and not-for-profit organization professionals who focus primarily […]
How to create a positive, helpful online community
What are associations for? People need to connect, to find peer-support, to engage in knowledge-sharing and to discover development opportunities. They want to come together, united by common interests and concerns, toward a shared purpose. As a safe, moderated, private space for exactly this, an online community has the potential to be the epicenter of […]
My 4 phases of bouncing back from burnout
I was an association executive. I started right out of college and, within six months, I became an executive director. I was in over my head, but worked 10-14 hour days to cover my lack of knowledge. I didn’t sleep, and when I did, it was from exhaustion after a complete emotional breakdown. I drank […]
Join us at SURGE 2017!
If you are reading this article, you are already committed to enquiry, to learning and to keeping yourself aware of the conversations taking place across the association space. If you are reading this article, you already positioned yourself within the association community and share in some of its concerns, its interests and its experiences. And […]