Happy Friday! How’s everyone adjusting to the time difference? I know I love that it’s still so light outside when I head home for the evening. As usual, there was lots of great content around the association community this week, so let’s get right to it!

1. Does your organization have a morning ritual? Jeffrey Cufaude wrote about one at an association he used to work for and how it positively affected the staff members. Even a seemingly simple meeting or few words of encouragement from the president or CEO can get a day started off right.

2. Jeff De Cagna has been participating in a Webcast discussing “Beyond Relevance,” and his blog post this week captured the spirit of the conversations. He argues that reinvention, rather than relevance, is necessary for associations to move forward and continue to succeed. Definitely a must-read.

3. Over at Midcourse Corrections, Jeff Hurt has been writing a series about how to write better conference session titles and descriptions. Be sure to check out the first installment: How to Write Killer Conference Session Titles That Attract Attendees. There’s ton of useful information and plenty of examples, as well.

Now for a blog post not written by someone named Jeff…

4. Joe Rominiecki sparked a great discussion in the Acronym comments with his post, Isn’t “content curator” just another term for “reporter?”. On the heels of the recent discussion about content curation, Joe pointed out that reporters have been “curating” content for years and years. The journalist in me loved the discussion … check out the comments and see what you think.

5. A few months ago, KiKi L’Italien declared today, March 19, “Love a Lurker Day.” Lindy Dreyer of SocialFish wrote a great letter to all “lurkers” (people who visit blogs and rarely — if ever — comment, join social networks but don’t participate, etc…). If you always read but never comment, I invite you speak up today! Everyone is an important part of the community whether they actively participate or not. Thanks for visiting.

Wherever you are, I hope you have a great sunny weekend!

Wednesday, I had the pleasure of attending the March luncheon of the Georgia Society of Association Executives. It was actually my first GSAE event (other MemberClicks team members attend quite often), and I had a fantastic time.

The speaker, M. Kirk Pickerel, has been the president of American Builders and Contractors for almost 10 years. ABC has 79 chapters and 25,000 members — quite a huge organization! He talked about ABC’s participation in the study that eventually led to the book, “Seven Measures of Success: What Remarkable Associations Do That Others Don’t.” Unfortunately, ABC wasn’t identified as a “remarkable” organization; it was one of the “good” ones paired up with a remarkable one for comparison!

However, Pickerel’s speech was a fantastic example of an association leader who saw room for improvement — and did something about it!

The seven measures are as follows:

1. A customer-service culture
2. Alignment of products and services with mission
3. Data-driven strategies
4. Dialogue and engagement
5. CEO as broker of ideas
6. Organizational adaptability
7. Alliance building

Pickerel said ABC’s biggest problem was something I’m betting a lot of organizations have trouble with: Organizational adaptability. Because ABC is such a large organization, it was difficult to institute any kind of sustaining change.

However, I think even smaller organizations can have trouble with adaptability. When you have so many things to take care of and so many hats to wear, it’s easy to get caught up in your everyday tasks and not reflect on how adaptable your organization is. Do you find it difficult to step back and identify positive changes your organization could institute?

How has your organization adapted to new technologies, processes or structures? What obstacles did you have to overcome?

Although ASAE’s Great Ideas Conference concluded last week, I want to encourage everyone to take advantage of the free recording  of the general closing session from Great Ideas with Daniel Pink. Pink, who’s the author of bestselling “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us,” had a great session and discussed how the concept of motivation and rewards are more complex for humans than we may think.

I downloaded the presentation and took the time to watch it since I wasn’t at Great Ideas and only followed the tweets with hashtag #ideas10. I know others have blogged about their own takeaways, but I wanted to include a few of my own thoughts.

1. Dan Pink is a great speaker. He’s entertaining and truly knows what he’s talking about.

2. Higher rewards lead to worse performance. This may sound counter-intuitive, so if you’re curious, listen to Pink explain why.

3. Allowing employees pursue their own projects 20 percent of the time leads to innovation and engagement (two HUGE association buzzwords!). Google follows this model, and it led to Gmail and many other Google products we all use today.

4. Everyone wants to be a master at their trade/job/career/whatever. Humans crave progress no matter what the reward. It’s intrinsic.

What’s unique about Dan Pink is that his speaking at Great Ideas was crowdsourced. ASAE & The Center issued a survey to members and attendees, who overwhelmingly said they want to hear from Dan at the conference.

This is a fantastic presentation that I think association professionals of all ages and experience levels can benefit from. It’s definitely worth your time.

When it comes to your members’ financial information, you really can never be too careful. And with so many technology options for associations out there, it’s difficult to know how to start narrowing down your list.

However, there is one common characteristic every vendor you’re considering should have: PCI Compliance.

Choosing a vendor that has met all six standards for PCI Compliance is the safest way to ensure that all financial information that goes through your database remains as secure as possible.

What does it mean, exactly, to be PCI Compliant? Payment Card Industry Compliance requires vendors to meet six standards:

• Build and maintain a secure network
• Protect cardholder data
• Maintain a vulnerability management program
• Implement strong access control measures
• Regularly monitor and test networks
• Maintain an information security policy

There’s no way to be partially compliant; it’s an all-or-nothing deal.

How did PCI Compliance come about?

Basically, the major credit card companies all agreed on the above set of standards, and they have the power to fine vendors or organizations who aren’t compliant. If your technology vendor isn’t compliant, neither is your organization.

We want to encourage every organization to consider PCI Compliance when choosing a vendor. Even if MemberClicks isn’t the right fit for your organization, it’s crucial to protect your and your members’ financial information by choosing a secure vendor.

For more information on PCI Compliance, click here.

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I was catching up on my Google Reader this morning (I still love Really Simple Syndication to keep track of the hundreds of blogs I subscribe to) and Frank Fortin’s post about the Association of the Future caught my eye.

If you’re unfamiliar with Association of the Future, it’s a kind of experiment run by ASAE and The Center and is meant to be a form of career development for young professionals. In the experiment, a group of selected young association professionals staff a mock association and attempt to project how associations down the road will be structured, how they will operate and how they will function.

There was a session introducing AOTF at the Great Ideas Conference last week, and Frank’s post was a reflection of that session.

I don’t want to rehash too much of Frank’s awesome post (you should definitely read it if you haven’t already), and I wasn’t at the conference, so I can’t make any observations on the session itself. But as a “young professional” (millennial, Gen-Y, what have you), Frank’s post made a big impression on me.

The ideas and recommendations to “change” governance and association’s structures weren’t really remarkable or innovative, Frank wrote.

How come?

AOTF’s mantra/mission/objective was “Members come first. No silos. Listen and then talk. Go techno.” (I think it’s an awesome mantra, by the way.) But Frank wrote that he and many session attendees didn’t feel the actions backed up the mantra.

I think it’s difficult for anyone to create truly innovative change in any organization they’ve been a part of for a long time. Rather than making sweeping “innovations,” it’s easier to just tweak lots of different processes and see what sticks. No matter what age you are, if you’re used to an organization functioning a certain way, it’s difficult to take a step back and see what could be. I honestly don’t think anyone is immune to the “that’s the way we’ve always done it” attitude.

Frank wrote that none of the suggestions and changes AOTF presented focused on the actual members. Why not? Isn’t that the point of an association — to facilitate relationships among people who share a common interest of career, and to provide them with resources and education to further those interests or careers?

I’m not sure why AOTF only looked at an association’s structure and governance, and I certainly wasn’t at the session, so I’ve love to get some feedback from people who were in attendance.

However, I think Frank hit on a key learning point and takeaway of this experiment: doing things the same way and expecting different results rarely works.

What do you think? How could AOTF produce innovative, startling changes with positive reactions?