Happy Monday! I hope everyone’s weekends were fun, productive and/or relaxing. I wanted to start things out this week by sharing a concept I’ve read about on a few other blogs: Monday mini-goals.

Rather than having big, overreaching goals for the year or month, I think sometimes it can be helpful to just break it down by week. And the goals don’t even have to be 100 percent professionally related. For example, one of my “mini-goals” every week is to get to the gym at least two times. (I’ve been trying to make sure to use my gym a certain amount of times each month to justify the membership costs.) One of my professional “Monday mini-goals” is to have a clear-cut to-do list for the next day. This way, when I get to the office, I can get right to work and know what my priorities are. Additionally, it helps me remember long-term to-dos if I write them down earlier … even if I don’t always get to them until the last minute.

Do you set mini, weekly goals for yourself or your association? For example, your association could decide to call a certain amount of members each week, just to see what kind of concerns they may have. This will give you valuable information about their experiences and also help both you and them put voices to names.

What are some small things you could achieve this week?

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Happy Friday! Who’s psyched for the weekend? I hope everyone is staying warm with all the crazy snow so much of the country has gotten so far this year. Anyway, as always, there were lots of great posts within the association blogosphere this week, so I’ve got five of my favorites below in case you missed any of them. Feel free to add your own in the comments!

1. Erik Schonher shared 25 universal secrets that could help drive your membership and non-dues revenue. And doesn’t every association want that? One of my favorites: make every customer believe they’re the only customer, even if they know it isn’t true. Isn’t that what providing a great member experience is all about?

2. Innovation is a hot topic in the association world, and Eric Lanke discusses Google’s 20% policy, which encourages Googlers to use 20 percent of their time to work on innovative projects of their own inspiration. Although it may be difficult to actually execute an innovative project with only 20 percent of your time, if you couple it with a good transparency policy about how ideas are selected, perhaps innovation could occur more often at your association.

3. Christina Stallings shared some great tips on how to stay focused. Although she geared the tips toward those who work from home, I think several of them could apply to everyone, no matter where you work. For one thing, she points out that maintaining a consistent schedule is key, and I know that’s definitely true in an office setting as well.

4. Jamie Notter discussed organizational culture and how we prefer for it to be stable. But just because you like your association’s culture a certain way doesn’t mean it can’t be better. It’s the whole “that’s the way we’ve always done it” mindset – but could it be holding you back?

5. David M. Patt shared some great statistics via Forbes Magazine – essentially, business executives overwhelmingly preferred face-to-face meetings for building deeper, more meaningful relationships. Although technology allows us to be more flexible and save money, face-to-face still has several advantages.

You’ve probably heard that spiel about how MemberClicks serves more than 1,400 throughout North America and Europe and has been in business for more than a decade, that doesn’t tell you much about what we offer and how we can help you. We’d like to introduce you to who we are and let you know first-hand how and why we serve the small-staff association space.

Our Meet MemberClicks Webinars are a great way to learn more. This is a group webinar so you can sit back and relax as a MemberClicks representative tells you and the other attendees a little bit about us. Participants are free to ask questions but aren’t required to contribute.

Basically, we’re really excited to share our story and our passion for small staff associations with new people! We’ve been all about small staff associations since 1998, and we think our enthusiasm is infectious! If you’re at all interested in who we are and what we, we encourage you to join us!

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You guys have heard of Groupon and other group-buying coupon sites, right? Well, drumroll please … Philanthroper is the same thing, but with charities!

Basically, the concept is that the site works with one charity a day and tries to convince as many people as possible to donate just $1 to that particular charity.

Another interesting thing to note? Philanthroper is interested in small charities. In its own words:

[W]e’re interested in nonprofits that make $1 million or less in revenue a year who are doing something really exceptional—bringing tangible change. [...] We look at their 990s (tax returns), read whatever information is out there and actually talk to these groups to really understand their mission from their perspective.

I think the idea of helping out organizations in need and inspiring a large amount of people to contribute is admirable. The site is pretty small right now — there are currently no ads — but hopefully it will gain traction in the coming months.

Also, the site claims to “never take a cut from your donation.” They’ve partnered with myPayy, which takes just one cent out of every dollar in transactional fees and Philanthroper keeps nothing.

Would your nonprofit be interested in participating in Philanthroper?

I like infographics like these because they easily put things into perspective. It’s easy to forget how new Facebook really is, especially now that more than 600 million people are using it.

When did you cave in and get a Facebook profile? (Or, like my dad, are you a steadfast resistor?) Personally, I’ve always been pretty fascinated by social media — I may have had a Geocities site or two back in the day.

Bulletin and message boards, AIM and e-mail are all still important aspects of social media. I think it’s crucial to not forget the “older” forms of online communication that still exist today. Sometimes, looking back at where we’ve been can be helpful when planning our future strategies.

How has your small staff association adapted to the technological changes of the past 20 years?

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