Help Your Members Find the Signal in the Noise

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

This is probably not news to you, but we’re at an information crisis point.

Your members and other audiences are dealing with a flood of information during a time when the role of traditional information gatekeepers has become severely devalued. People are overwhelmed with information, much of it false or untrustworthy, and are increasingly unable to discern what is reliable and what is not.

Associations can help.

In the latest, just-released, hot off the presses (or at least Adobe InDesign) Spark collaborative whitepaper, Hilary Marsh (Content Company) and I propose content curation as associations’ secret weapon for helping our members surface relevant information and place it in the context they need to help them make sense of their increasingly complex personal and professional worlds.

Cut Through the Clutter: Content Curation, Associations’ Secret Weapon Against Information Overload opens by detailing the scope of the information crisis we’re currently facing, describes the key elements of effective content curation, and provides detailed, actionable steps that association executives can take to curate information effectively for your audiences.

The whitepaper includes:

  • An association content curation maturity model.
  • A case study with the Institute of Food Technologists.
  • An interview with Carrie Hane and Dina Lewis, CAE, who co-authored the recent ASAE Foundation content strategy report, Association Content Strategies for a Changing World, with Hilary.
  • An interview with Bryan Kelly, one of the founders of rasa.io and the publisher-in-chief of Smart Letter, discussing the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in content curation.
  • A summary of the ASAE Foundation report, Association Content Strategies for a Changing World.
  • A list of “how-to” guides and curation tools.
  • A series of thought questions for you to use to spark discussion with your team.
  • An extensive list of resources in case you want to dig deeper on any of the topics addressed.

I’ll be blogging about the whitepaper in the coming days, highlighting some of our major findings, but in the meantime I invite you to download your free copy at https://bit.ly/34P5THr – we don’t collect any data on you to get it, and you won’t end up on some mailing list you didn’t ask for. We just use the bit.ly as an easy mechanism to count the number of times it’s been downloaded.

And don’t forget to check out the other FREE Spark collaborative whitepapers, too: