I’ve got a few great slideshows for our readers today. Has there been a recent presentation or webinar that has really blown you away? Feel free to share!

Unfortunately, Slideshare’s embedding feature does not seem to be working properly, so to see each presentation, please click the title link above the image.

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Pair Emerging Technologies with Established Resources for Effective Marketing and Member Engagement

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3 14 11 great ideas presentation

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Happy Friday! I hope everyone had a fun St. Patrick’s Day, whether you’re Irish or not! Thanks to ASAE’s Great Ideas Conference, there were lots of good posts in the association community this week. A few of my favorites are below. Which ones stuck out to you?

1. Tony Rossell wrote an insightful post about pricing your products, goods and services. Pricing these things should not be an afterthought and should clearly reflect the value they provide and how much members are willing to pay. Tony discusses five different pricing methods, and why each one is beneficial.

2. At the Acronym blog, Katie Paffhouse shared insights from an Idea Lab at the Great Ideas Conference about creating your own competition. What’s your reaction when a small faction teams up for “unofficial” get-togethers or meetings? Are these groups vital to your organization’s wellbeing, or do you automatically view them as competition?

3. The Associations Live blogged shared a few great tips for using Google Analytics. A free tool, Google Analytics is extremely important for associations to use, as it can give you valuable insight about who is visiting your website and how they’re viewing it, in addition to several other important insights.

4. Even if you aren’t returning from Great Ideas, take Jeffrey Cufaude’s advice: when you get back to the office, don’t share all your new learnings at once. Just because you’re brimming with enthusiasm and zest doesn’t mean others are. “Link your suggestions to existing strategies,” Jeffrey writes.

5. Would your association ever consider free membership as a strategy? David M. Patt shared an example of how some associations operate this way. Getting something for free today could inspire a member to pay for something else tomorrow. It’s all about perspective.

Wherever you are, we hope you enjoy the beautiful spring weather this weekend!

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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.

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?

Happy Friday! It’s finally starting to fee like spring here in Atlanta; now if only those annoying rainstorms would quit. I’m so ready for spring: more daylight, outdoor eating, baseball, the NFL Draft, flowers … it’s pretty perfect. Speaking of more daylight, don’t forget to spring your clocks forward this Saturday night before hitting the sack. Losing an hour is the only downside of the beginning of Daylight Savings Time — I’m really looking forward to longer days.

With many people attending the Great Ideas Conference, there was some great stuff in the association blogosphere this week, but not every post highlighted the conference.

1. Wes Trochlil shared some tips for organizations converting their data to a new database. There are some great reminders here, such as to stop keeping track of data you don’t need or use, keep your legacy database for future reference and only convert the data you need. Wes’ database tips always spot-on.

2. One of the newer-to-me blogs I’ve discovered recently is Ellen Behrens’. She writes the aLearning blog, and her post this week on exit interviews for members was fantastic. Members who don’t renew often have powerful information that would be beneficial to the organization, so definitely take a look at this post.

3. I read a ton of blogs, and they’re not all association-focused. This post, though, from the Six Pixels of Separation blog, discusses mobile technologies: “The Lines Continue to Blur (at Breakneck Speeds).” This one’s a great reminder about how much the use of mobile technology is increasing — and that it’s not just kids who are using it. Are you ready?

4. Lynn Morton wrote some awesome posts about Great Ideas this week, but here’s her takeaway post. From the more casual (use Emergen-C if you’re sick!) to the more serious (the spirit is there, the content is not), Lynn shared her thoughts from ASAE’s conference and encourages others to push the envelope a bit more.

5. Maddie Grant also had a great collection of takeaway and links post-Great Ideas. Her main takeaway was the concept of “autonomy,” which was discussed during Dan Pink’s closing general session. Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.

I hope everyone had a great weekend! Don’t forget to set your clocks forward!

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