Happy Friday! I hope everyone’s had a fantastic week and is looking forward to a fun or productive weekend (or perhaps both?)

As usual, there was some awesome content around the association world this week, and it’s all making me more and more excited for ASAE’s Annual Meeting and Expo in Los Angeles! If you’re going to be there, be sure to stop by Booth 332 to say hi to the team!

Now, without further ado, five of my favorite posts from this week…

1. Joe Flowers has been writing  a great series about his association’s Web redesign. With part three this week, he discussed how the organization went about narrowing the choice down between two vendors. It’s definitely worth taking a look at this series to see one example of how a small staff organization goes about redesigning one of the most important aspects of its presence: its website.

2. I loved Lisa Junker’s post at the Acronym blog about lessons to be learned from Pixar. Encourage unplanned collaboration, have reminders of the central purpose and see challenges as inspiration are all lessons Lisa gleaned from a documentary about the animation company. Rather than cutting corners, Lisa wrote, the Pixar team always saw challenges as inspirations to be better.

3. Jeff Hurt had a great post this week about organizational transparency, with a handy checklist for associations to learn from. For example, does your organization offer open board meetings? annual audits? financial disclosure statements? disclosed partnerships? Members — and those who donate to the organization — may want to have this information readily available. Transparency will never stop being important to associations.

4. We can do better, wrote Jamie Notter this week. Taking an example from Apple, who has to deal with many of its devices (which contain toxic components) end up in landfills, Jamie wrote about changing the culture of improvement to promote more value among everyone. Rather than just looking at benchmarks that improve the organization, how can your organization promote good in the culture at large?

5. One of my favorite posts at the new AssociationTECH blog this week was about the tip-a-day alerts program by association members from the American Evaluation Association. The benefits of the program — such as sharing ideas and expertise, engaging a variety of members and collaborating with other groups — are great, and so are the lessons learned. Definitely a great post for those looking to engage members.

From everyone at MemberClicks, have a fantastic weekend!

Image source

There’s a new blog in the association world, and it’s all about one of our favorite things here at MemberClicks: technology.

Started by Maddie Grant, associationTECH is a community blog for anyone in the association world interested in technology. And since technology affects so  many of us (dare I say all of us) in our daily lives, I hope this blog is fun, informative and relevant to the association community.

On the “About” page, the goals listed include:

- Enable creativity and experimentation among association technology people by providing a space where association technology people (and anyone else) can discuss whatever tech-related issues they want
- Build community around ASAE and associations by linking to some of our great association tech bloggers, finding new voices among the ASAE technology section (that’s you!), and showcasing individual association people doing awesome things
- Build thought leadership from an association industry perspective by connecting the association tech community with the nonprofit tech community (nptechies, NTEN et al) and creating a presence for the association tech community in the wider tech blogosphere.

No matter what size your organization, everyone can benefit from learning more about technology and how others use it to simplify their daily lives. Small staff association professionals, especially, are able to utilize technology to be more productive due to the many “hats” they have to wear each and every day.

One great aspect of associationTECH is that it is a true community blog. Anyone can become a contributor. E-mail maddie@socialfish.org to get started.

Current contributors include Cecilia Sepp (CS Association Services) and Paul Schneider (Socious).

I’m definitely looking forward to reading more from this blog, and contributing myself! There are so many resources for association professionals in the blog world, and by combining forces (so to speak), associationTECH can be another great one.

Image source