What if GenX Leaves Your Association Workforce and Membership?

I got an e-mail this past week from an old friend of mine from high school (a fellow GenXer). She mentioned to me that she and her husband are thinking of leaving corporate America and starting a business of their own—they just aren’t getting anywhere at work and it’s taking a toll on them and [...]

Week One at My New Association

I haven’t been blogging as much because my new position at a new (for me) association has kept me pretty busy. I come home at night feeling mentally exhausted from all the new stuff I am learning. It will only be a matter of time before everything that I am learning now will be second [...]

Times Are Tight and There Are Ways to Help Your Members

I’ve been mulling over a post by Kristin Clarke that I read on the ASAE blog, Acronym.  The post is about some of the things financial-based associations are doing to help with the current economic crisis. In particular she talks about the American Staffing Association, the Financial Planning Association, and the American Bankers Association are [...]

Going to Miss the Members

It hit me today. I only have two weeks left in my current association and I am really going to miss the members. Sure, I will miss staff too, but since most of them are local, in the same field as me, etc… keeping in touch with my staff friends is pretty easy to do. [...]

Good News and Bad News

I have good news! An association hired me as their new communications manager!
Since I earned my CAE, I’ve been job hunting (looking for a position that could offer career growth). My current association is wonderful and I love the members and staff—but with the current structure there is limited growth potential. Not only is this [...]

How Much Information Should Be Free?

Recently I convinced my association to change the way we publish our magazine online. In the past, we would convert a portion of the magazine to a text file and build individual html pages for each article—reformatting as we went along.
As the person who did this, I can tell you it was a time consuming [...]

Help Me to Help My Bloggers

Instead of sharing my thoughts, I need your suggestions.
My association’s blog is in its infancy and the bloggers who are participating are doing great and really working hard to make the new blog a success. The problem I am having is that a few of them really don’t understand what a blog is and what [...]

CAE Study Tip: Form a Study Group

Overall I think a CAE study group is a good thing. My study group only had three people in it and we met weekly in a Starbucks mainly to review what read. We found sitting for a few hours and talking about things worked great. And knowing that I had other people to “report to” [...]

Don’t Hand Your Your Members a Rake When They Need a Hammer

“There are so many things to do in social media and such little time to do it because if you don’t do it someone else will and you’ll lose members and…” (okay, take a breath).
This is the subtle message I hear about social media and associations when I attend conferences, go to workshops, read articles, [...]

CAE Study Tip: Talk to the Dog

My dogs helped me with the CAE exam.
No, they aren’t like Doctor Who’s K-9 or anything, but they did hear me out.  What I did was talk out loud to them about concepts I found confusing. This helped me think though subjects and topics. For example, I once sat down on the floor and explained [...]