Category: whitepaper

Announcing: Member Relations

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Announcing: Member Relations

I’m excited to launch the second Spark whitepaper – Member Relations: An Association-Centric Approach to Customer Relationship Management, which, with the assistance of George Breeden and Tom Lehman, I recently completed.

This week, I’ll be blogging about the contents of the whitepaper.

The basic premise is:

Associations are starting to look at CRM (customer relationship management) software, either as an adjunct to or a replacement for, their more traditional AMS systems. However, without a proper understanding and adoption of CRM as a philosophy, the software itself it pretty pointless. Moreover, AMS and CRM are not a one-to-one replacement for each other, so it’s important to understand what they can each do (and not do) and how that matches (or doesn’t match) your association’s needs before taking the plunge. Finally, I offer case studies of three associations that have each taken a different path to meeting their audience data needs, and share what they’ve learned and their advice for others who might be considering the same approach.

I’ll be writing more about each of these points this week, but in the meantime, pick up your free copy at http://bit.ly/10s8UUb, no divulging of information about yourself required.

Content Curation and Membership Associations

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

It’s the final day of whitepaper release week, which means it’s time to focus on what associations can do about the problem of information overload to better serve our members.

From my new whitepaper, Attention Doesn’t Scale: The Role of Content Curation in Membership Associations:

Content curation provides a potential path to a new type of thought leadership, one that is more suited to a world where information is no longer the scarce resource. Focus is. Meaning is. Wisdom is.

….

Our audiences need our help. But they need it in non-traditional ways. They need our assistance learning to think clearly and creatively when surrounded by ambiguity and complexity. They need our aid placing what is happening in the world around them in context so they can ascertain potential implications, determine the most likely outcomes, and plan appropriately. And they need to be able to make good decisions, personally and professionally, in a sometimes-chaotic climate.

Want more? Download your free copy at http://bit.ly/WVpP4a.

 

The Solution: Content Curation

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

From my new whitepaper, Attention Doesn’t Scale: The Role of Content Curation in Membership Associations:

Information overload is not only a factor of volume. It’s also heavily influenced by the fact that the large disparity in the sources of incoming information leads to an even larger disparity in the topics and focus of the information. We have plenty of data – too much, in fact – but we lack meaning, a sense of how all the streams of information coming in fit together to point us to wise decision-making. The curator adds context, trust, and meaning to that previously disaggregated mass of stuff.

Want more? Download your free copy at http://bit.ly/WVpP4a.

The Problem: Information Overload

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

From my new whitepaper, Attention Doesn’t Scale: The Role of Content Curation in Membership Associations:

The concept of information overload was originated by futurist Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book Future Shock as part of his depiction of a world in which the rate of change would accelerate to the point that governments, society, and individuals would be unable to keep up – would, in fact, be “future shocked.”

The new wrinkle is that, while it was always possible for any given individual to publish to the web (assuming, in the early days, she could find a hosting service and learn to write HTML code), technology now makes it simple for anyone and everyone to publish rich multimedia content from virtually anywhere at virtually any time. Hence the zettabyte problem mentioned above, which is estimated to cost the US economy as much as 25% of the average knowledge worker’s day to lost productivity, which adds up to a $900 billion drain on the economy.

Want more? Download your free copy at http://bit.ly/WVpP4a.

Attention Doesn’t Scale

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to present on the topic Attention Doesn’t Scale: The Role of Content Curation in Membership Associations for the Indiana Society of Association Executives. As a component of that presentation, and with Jeff De Cagna‘s advice and assistance, I wrote a white paper on the same topic.

This week, I’m going to be blogging about what’s in the white paper.

My basic premise was:

  1. Information overload, while not a new problem, has gotten so much more severe in the last few decades as to turn a difference in quantity into a difference in kind.
  2. Membership associations are making this problem worse for our members.
  3. But we don’t have to. Switching from an information creation mindset to an information curation mindset is one potential way out of our dilemma.

I’ll be writing  more about each of these points in turn this week, but in the meantime, please pick up a free copy of the white paper at http://bit.ly/WVpP4a.