The countdown has begun to the #ASAE11, ASAE’s annual conference in St. Louis, MO.  There are many reasons I am excited including the session I will be involved in on Monday, August 8 at 8:45a. This session, “Design for the Future: Creating a Sustainable Local-State-National Member Community”, shares the journey the American Association of Diabetes Educators (AADE) took to retool their local chapters for the future. With Nadine Merker, AADE director of volunteer services, and Scott Balthazor svp, customer operations, Socious, we will share AADE’s new chapter model and its new online member community.

The three of us probably had more fun compiling the “lessons learned” handout than any other part of the presentation. That’s probably natural since its fun to look back. There’s nothing like being a Monday morning quarterback. Four of the most telling lessons we’ll be sharing – by story – are: ...

My aha for the day (maybe the week or month!): associations are approaching social media the same way they approach chapters and other components.  The aha came out of reading an insightful post from Scott Gould on How I Profile A Community’s Participation To Inform Next Actions. About four paragraphs into what Scott warns at the start is a long post, there is the statement that triggered by aha: Relationship is participation with one another.

Over on Association Marketing Springboard, Lindy Dreyer wrote about another self-forming group concept. Looks like more people (okay associations) are doing this. This one is from InfoComm International, a non-profit association serving the professional AV communications industry worldwide.

There are many lessons from our elections and one may well be classified as a great aha for national associations and their geographic components.

A must read posting (and article in October issue of Associations Now) on the future and associations is over at Acronym. Lisa Junker conducted the interview that is the basis for both with futurist Rohit Talwar, CEO of Fast Future Research and a key player in ASAE's future research. Here's perhaps one of the most important points highlighted in the posting...

Announcing a new resource for exploring the chapter of the future ... Over the past couple of years, we've been working with a number of associations on the issue of how to address the struggles of the current chapter. Much of this research, discussion and testing has led us to a couple of observations.