Day 1 of ASAE's 2012 Marketing, Membership & Communications Conference in Washington, DC, started off with a look at how the membership value proposition is changing (or has already) for associations. In her opening general session, Sarah Sladek, author of The End of Membership As We Know It, told attendees that associations must create a "must-have" membership. "Nice to have is not enough," she said.

Sladek (pictured above) points to the generational shift from a belief in conformity (among baby boomers) to a belief in individuality (among genrations X and Y) as one of the driving forces behind the declining success of traditional membership tactics. Today, new generations of members will only join when they see how an association can solve a problem for them, and they won't renew if they aren't finding solutions.

Connecting members with those solutions came up as a key challenge during the first round of Learning Labs. In "Conversation that Matters: VPs of Marketing," I listened as a group of association marketing professionals discussed how to better connect members (and potential members) with the knowledge from the association and the community that is the most valuable and relevant to them.

In the course of conversation, the eternal question of what knowledge should be open to the public and what should be members-only came up, and it was suggested that an association's marketing department ought to have a keen enough understanding of the association's members and audience to know what knowledge resources are valuable enough to be members-only and what resources are better suited as free, open attention getters.

That role stands out to me as one of the most important roles an association's marketing department can serve today, especially in light of Sladek's emphasis on membership value lying in the ability to solve problems. At one point Sladek asked attendees, "What would happen if your association disappeared tomorrow? Would anyone care?" Obviously, if no one would care, that's a problem for you. But if your association disappeared and suddenly your members had specific problems they could no longer solve on their own, that will point to the value of membership. So, in determining which knowledge resources fall on which side of the membership wall, the question "Does this knowledge solve a problem for our members?" can be a valuable guide. Is it "must-have" knowledge, or is it just nice to have?

Stay tuned here on Acronym for more from MMCC, and follow the conversation on Twitter via the #MMCCon12 hashtag. And for more from Sarah Sladek, see:

• "Neglecting a Big Slice of Potential Membership"
• "Is Your Association's Culture Helping or Hurting Member Recruitment and Retention? "
• "How to Build Membership Relationships That Last"

ROI. The biggest return on investment for an association doing content curation may be intangible: bolstering your association's reputation as the best place (or at least one of the best places) to find high-quality knowledge and useful news in your specific field or industry. (This should sound familiar if you already publish a magazine, journal, newsletter, blog, etc.) Done well, this can lead to better recruitment, more engagement, and upticks in all the related products and services you offer that have real revenue attached (meetings, education, certifications, etc).

For associations, I think that curation is at most a secondary activity that should complement primary lines of business/value.

— David Gammel (@davidgammel) May 17, 2012

David Gammel summed it up well in a tweet yesterday (at right). If you're familiar with David's Engagement Acceleration Curve, you could plot content curation at the far left, near other content marketing and attention-driving strategies.

And like your traditional content, content curation could help boost revenue via advertising, but again this ought to be additive to the content you're already producing, not a replacement for it. If you find yourself going link crazy just to drive page views, take a look at newspapers to see how that's working out for them. And there are some other concerns with advertising next to other people's content, but more on that later.

These next few items are where content curation at an association gets more complicated than at an independent media outlet or as a solo practitioner on the web.

Diversity. Any good content curator will search a wide, diverse pool of perspectives and sources of knowledge (within a subject area, at least) and will also strive for diversity in the content he or she curates for the audience. That's just good sense for the community's general body of knowledge. But other diversity and inclusion considerations will factor in as well, such as highlighting new and underrepresented voices in the industry. This is a worthy goal for any association (and often an expressly stated one), but it might not always align perfectly with other measurements of content, so it's important for the association content curator to keep both goals in mind.

Influence. If your association is well positioned, your curation of others' content will be valuable exposure for those sources. Exposure that must not be doled out unevenly or haphazardly. An association curator's sources will often be paying members—and, specifically, paying supplier members who want to see their membership dues result in better exposure to the market. Ultimately, your responsibility lies in curating the best, most useful content for your audience, so it will help to have a clear definition of "best" and "useful" in case you hear from people who think you ought to be including their content in your curation.

Fair use. When you're dealing heavily in relaying other people's content, you run the risk of copyright infringement if you use it in inappropriate ways and without proper attribution. The rules of intellectual property law are sometimes fuzzy, but the simple mantras of "don't steal" and "give credit where credit is due" will generally steer you in the right direction. But these are doubly important for an association curator since so many sources are paying members. Even if you don't run afoul of copyright laws, could you upset members if they feel your association is taking advantage of their contributions? Possibly. Consider tools like Scoop.It, Pinterest, and Tumblr. Great tools for curating and sharing content easily. But what if you slapped some advertising on your Scoop.It page, next to all those handy links and teasers to other people's content? Some sources might not be as agreeable anymore.

If your association is curating content for your audience, I'd be interested to hear how your members are responding and how you're handling some of these issues. And if you missed the earlier posts on curation, here they are, plus one from last year:

• A little curation on curation for associations
• Curation, retail style
• Isn't "content curator" just another term for "reporter"?

That discussion got me thinking a lot about the topic, and so I spent some time reading what others have written about content curation already (which is quite a lot). In the interest of practicing what I preach (and in not restating what others have already said much better than I could), I decided to gather and share a handful of the most useful resources I've found on content curation:

Where to start if you're new to "curation":

• Beth Kanter: "Content Curation Primer," October 4, 2011
• Rohit Bhargava: "The 5 Models Of Content Curation," March 31, 2011

On the actual job of curation:

• Steve Rosenbaum: "Content Curators Are The New Superheros Of The Web," April 16, 2012
• Robin Good: "Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 5: The Curator Attributes And Skills," October 6, 2010
• Robin Good: "Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 6: The Tools Universe," October 13, 2010
• Robert Bruce: "How to Dominate Your Industry like Drudge"

On associations' role as content curators:

• Ellen Behrens: "Content Curation," August 19, 2011
• Jeff Hurt: "The Person Who Chooses Your Conference Content Has All The Power," December 12, 2011
• Steve Drake: "In 'Content Fried' World, Associations Content Curation Can Benefit Members," February 14, 2012
• Aaron Wolowiec: "Associations as curators: Supporting your speakers, educators and facilitators to success," January 18, 2012
• Steve Rosenbaum: "Will Associations Become Filters for Digital Overload?" May 6, 2012
• Maggie McGary: "Why I Doubt Associations Will Become Filters for Digital Overload," May 9, 2012

More curated info about curation:

• "Net2 Think Tank Round-up: Curating Content," September 26, 2011
• "Content and Curation for Nonprofits," Scoop.It page curated by Beth Kanter
• "Content Curation for NonProfits," Scoop.It page curated by Ken Dickens

After all that reading, I came to a couple conclusions that I think can also help you approach curation at your association:

Curation is a philosophy, not a tactic. If you take some time to read some or all of these articles, you'll find that "curation" takes on a lot of different meanings and forms, depending on who you talk to. You might find that frustrating, particularly if you're looking for how-do-I-do-it-today advice, but I think curation is best viewed as a philosophy rather than a tactic. I like Rohit Bhargava's definintion, because it encompasses any range of methods that accomplish the same goal: "finding, grouping, organizing, or sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific issue."

You can apply that goal to just about any form of content that your association might produce, ranging from blogs and magazines to research and education. But make note of the wording: "the best and most relevant content," not "your best and most relevant content." That's the shift that associations have to make, from being the source of expertise to being the conveyer of expertise, regardless of the source. Viewed this way, curation is more of a new filter or lens through which to look at the things associations already do, rather than an entirely new source of value.

Real time vs. long tail. Of all the various forms that content curation can take, I see them mostly falling into one of two buckets, which I haven't seen clearly identified elsewhere:

• Real-time curation. This is the ongoing, day-to-day form of curation. It's how you keep your members up to date. The subject area can be wide (as wide as your association's profession, perhaps), and the criteria for selection expand from "best" and "relevant" to also include "new." This form can appeal to a big audience, but it has a short shelf life, as it needs constant attention. Think "today's top news."
• Long-tail curation. This is the long-term, highly specific form of curation. It's how you help your members dig deep into a topic. The subject area in each case is narrow, and the criteria for selection might be best described as "the absolute best" and "the most relevant." And the timeframe for selected content can go back for years, as long as the content stays relevant. This form appeals to a specific audience in each case, but it has a long shelf life. It could be maintained with only periodic updating. Think "Wikipedia."

Both of these forms can be valuable for associations to provide to their audiences, because they address two different user scenarios: the user who engages often to stay in touch, and the user who only comes to you when they have a specific problem to solve. (Of course, these aren't exclusive; a single person can engage with your association in both ways at different times.) But in either case, if your association is the place to easily find the best information and knowledge from throughout your profession, you'll keep those users (members or non) coming back.

Jackson's specific point is that however much they try to innovate, web-based companies like Yahoo and Facebook remain products of the times in which they were founded, subject to all the prejudices and blinkered thinking of that moment. Yahoo, for instance, was the world leader in web-portal expertise a decade ago, but that isn't particularly meaningful in a mobile-ized world, and the company is struggling. More broadly, though, Jackson is making a case for "organizational ecology," which argues that:

organizational outcomes have much more to do with industry effects than who the CEO is and the choices he or she makes. [Organizational ecologists] study birth and death rates of populations of organizations, as well as the effects of age, competition and resources in the surrounding environment on an organization's birth and death rate.

Put another way: Leaders are lousy at predicting the future. They stick with what worked when they started, and don't effectively move their organizations forward. So ultimately the future moves the organization for them---or puts them out of business.

It's true that leaders tend to be bad at predicting the future. We all are: every so often I see somebody post a link showing a story from decades ago about what life will be like in the 21st century, and we all have a good laugh about it. But I think association leaders do have more influence than Jackson suggests, and aren't simply passive respondents to market forces.

The main reason I think that is because associations are, practically by definition, active respondents to market forces. An association's role is to listen to members in the aggregate, gathering information about where the growth opportunities and threats are. Not every association does a great job of gathering that information, or presenting it back to members so they can act on it, but the antennae for detecting what's coming next is built into association DNA. Corporations run under the mantra, "Evolve or die." Associations monitor the evolution patterns.

Well, in a perfect world, they do---and enough of them continue to do it well enough to keep the doors open. But reading Jackson's article make me think that the next big challenge for associations---just as much as membership, internationalization, nondues revenue, and mobile---is improving their monitoring skills. If it's true that "the next 5 - 8 years could be incredibly dynamic," as Jackson writes, members will have a growing need for help from their associations for tools to address those changes.

So what does the effective CEO do on that front? Give members more opportunities to meet in person? Double down on online communications tools? More data mining?

Risk management. What's the difference between a policy and a procedure? Leslie White clears it up for us and says that most associations are doing it wrong.

Virtual events. Celisa Steele looks at some recent data on associations and virtual events and writes that most virtual events still need to be tied to an in-person event to gain traction.

Leadership. Eric Lanke, CAE, shares a story from a colleague who learned that "leadership is not about getting your way."

Attitude. Deirdre Reid, CAE, asks if your association has the right attitude for future success, and shares five attitudes identified by digital strategist Jasper Visser.

Government relations. Stefanie Reeves, CAE, discusses how the principles from the book Humanize apply to association lobbying departments.

International growth. Peter Turner shares lessons, slides, and video interviews about opportunities for associations in India and China, from two of his colleagues at MCI who spoke at ASAE's International Conference last week.

Curation.

• Author Steve Rosenbaum, who spoke at Digital Now two weeks ago, suggests that associations can help their members cope with digital overload.
• Maggie McGary responds to Rosenbaum's column to air some doubts about associations taking on the role of curator.

Change management.

• Jeffrey Cufaude says no one wants to hear that they need to be fixed, which means leaders of change will fail if they treat stakeholders like they are broken.
• Heidi Zimmerman at The Common Thread blog shares the three-year process her association has followed to build buy-in for a memberhip resturcturing.

Online community.

• Joshua Paul writes that an online member community site should be a daily stop for staff in multiple association departments, not just membership.
• Rachel Happe at The Community Roundtable lists the various ways community managers are woefully squeezed between high demands and low resources. Are you treating your social media and community managers this way?

Innovation.

• Kerry Stackpole, FASAE, CAE, says leaders must practice forgetting. "It's hugely difficult for leaders to overcome the tendency to live amidst our memories," he writes.
• At a recent conference hosted by Wired magazine, author Dan Pink (who will also speak at ASAE's 2012 Annual Meeting & Expo) says organizations must create opportunities for "non-commissioned work" to foster disruptive innovation.

Meetings.

• Are room blocks still necessary? Meetings & Conventions magazine asked planners that question and got some interesting answers.
• Jena McGregor at the PostLeadership blog puzzles over the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's now-retracted ad seeking a motivational magician leadership speaker. This might be a good litmus test for your association's meetings: would they sound appropriate if they showed up in the pages of a major national newspaper?

Membership associations are a lot like pizza parlors.

I read somewhere that three-fourths of Americans like pizza. Likewise, most Americans belong to a membership association. (However, if you're among the one-fourth of Americans who don't like pizza, bear with me. I do have a point to make here.)

For a really long time, associations have been serving pizza. In other words, associations have mastered how to deliver products, services, and events that really appeal to one audience in particular.

The baby boomers love the pizza that associations serve up, and in most cases they are the ones frequenting the pizza parlors and eating all the pizza, as well as managing the pizza-making process and restaurant operations, and possibly even making the pizza themselves!

Now you have people coming into your restaurant asking what else is available. Maybe they don't like pizza. Maybe they're hoping your association will offer something else in addition to pizza.

These new consumers tend to be younger. Their unique interests, needs, wants, and expectations have left some boomers thinking these consumers are self-centered, demanding, and foolish for wanting something other than the fantastic pizza they've made.

Suddenly, as the owner of the pizza parlor, your association has a mess on its hands. Your new customers are storming off in frustration while management complains that new customers are needed but they certainly aren't serving anything other than pizza.

So what does your association do? Do you stop serving pizza altogether? Or do you continue to serve only pizza?

Neither.

Your pizza parlor should continue producing its great pizza and recruit these new consumers to come in and help your association master making some new foods, too.

If your association expects to grow membership, it can't abandon its traditions. But it also can't ignore the opportunity to introduce new members to new members benefits and marketing strategies.

The U.S. Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics both predict that by 2015 baby boomers will cede the majority of the workforce to generation Y. It will be the largest shift in human capital in history.

Yet most membership associations remain almost entirely governed and supported by the baby boom generation. If we take an honest look at membership we can see that most associations are still struggling to engage generation X (currently ages 30-46), much less generation Y (ages 16-29)!

Can you fathom the world being dominated by people in their 20s and early 30s? The baby boom generation has been in power for so long, it's difficult to imagine our corporations, government, schools, nonprofits, and just about every industry out there being influenced by other generations.

And if gen Ys aren't already highly engaged in your association, do you have a plan for engaging them within the next four years? You can't keep your pizza parlor intact and expect to miraculously build a membership monopoly that engages younger generations. It won't happen.

So take off your apron, roll up your sleeves, and let's get started on building a highly successful, multigenerational membership monopoly.

Step 1: Understand Generational Differences

Many association executives make the mistake of thinking that younger generations just aren't joining their association because they haven't grown into it yet. "Just give it time," they say. "Soon they'll have more interest in their community/more money/more responsibility/more something and they will want to join."

And to these associations I say, "Don't hold your breath."

Think about it. We're all a little more footloose and fancy-free in our twenties. As we age, we gain more wisdom and responsibility, get tired more easily, and approach life very differently. The behavioral differences between a 20-year-old and 60-year-old are age differences.

However, the decision to join an association (or not to join) isn't an age difference. It's a generational difference.

Just take a look at generation X---its oldest members are 46 and associations are still struggling to engage them. This generation is nearing middle-age and they still aren't "joiners"!

The decision to join an association isn't something you grow into alongside mortgage payments and diaper changing. The decision to join isn't the result of wisdom or maturity; it's rooted in our most basic needs and wants.

If younger generations aren't joining your association, there's a reason. It has absolutely nothing to do with their immaturity and everything to do with your association's inability to deliver value to them.

As I mentioned above in the pizza parlor example, your association is likely managed, supported, and frequented by baby boomers. That would mean baby boomers are your association's target market.

This is all fine and good, but if you want your association to grow and sustain, your target market needs to shift to generations X and Y---and these generations want their memberships to provide them with ample opportunities to learn, lead, and make a difference.

Step 2: Create a Place to Belong

Even more basic than that, all members, regardless of age, needs to feel like they belong. Your association doesn't see much turnover within the boomer membership because you are satisfying their need to belong.

But what about the other generations? Do they feel like they belong in your association?

Belonging by definition means two things. It means that you have a secure relationship and it also means that you have ownership in something.

For generations X and Y to feel like they belong, they are looking to your association to listen---and act upon---their points of view, generate new ideas and create alternatives , provide a positive and motivating membership experience, and include them in leadership and decision-making processes.

Generations X and Y need to feel a secure relationship and a sense of ownership in your association before they join. In contrast, most baby boomers will join an association because they feel it's the right thing to do and they work at the belonging piece of it after the fact.

However, your association will struggle to recruit and retain younger members if they don't feel like they belong in your association. As soon as you understand the significance of that need, your association can begin to make progress towards meeting it.

Menu Diversification

I've made a strong case here in favor of recruiting and retaining younger generations. It's not because I think you should fold up your prosperous pizza-making business and start up a spaghetti factory.

What I do want you to do is to start thinking of your association like a buffet.

It's 2012 and your most loyal customer base has started to shrink. You may not even notice anything happening yet, but it will. With each passing year, it will get a little smaller and 20 years from now, it won't even exist.

The question is: Will your association still exist?

Younger generations have different needs and wants. Their appetite is different. Ignore them, and they will find somewhere else to eat.

And I'm not talking about feeding a little goldfish here. At 120 million people, generations X and Y are the equivalent of a herd of elephants! They have the power to make or break your association.

Start thinking about all the needs within your membership and cater to them all.
It's the only way to keep your pizza parlor from going bankrupt.

Association professionals who missed Peter Sheahan's general session presentation at last year's ASAE Annual Meeting had a chance to catch him today at ASAE's Springtime Expo. After speaking broadly about innovation last August, Sheahan narrowed in on innovation within association meetings Thursday, appropriate for the crowd of meeting planners and meetings industry professionals.

Sheahan, author of several books on innovation, including Making It Happen: Turning Good Ideas Into Great Results, acknowledged that innovation within meetings can be difficult, particularly when, for many associations, conferences and events are cash cows. While industry data shows meetings are recovering following the recession, the time to innovate is when life is good, he said. "Will it be easier to innovate now, or in five years?" he asked.

So, how to innovate within meetings without harming something that already works? Sheahan recommended "compartmentalization" of innovation. That's a big word, but it's about innovation on a small scale: Don't change every element of your meeting; instead, just pick one small part to try something new. By keeping change to one "compartment," you also keep risk confined to that one area. If it bombs, the rest of the meeting is still safe.

This concept sounds a bit like "incremental change," but it differs in an important way. While incremental change involves small changes across the board, compartmentalization focuses change in a specific aspect of a meeting. Within that aspect, though, the change can be as small or big as you want, and it allows you to put enough energy into that change to make it great. When you try to change everything at once instead, you end up with everything being "kind of good, but nothing great," Sheahan said.

Lest you think innovation isn't already happening in association meetings, Sheahan cited three examples from articles Associations Now:

• "Nondues Revenue from Nonmember Education," by Andrew S. Lang, November 2011
• "It's Time to Think Beyond the Tradeshow Booth," by Jacqui Cook, April 2011
• "Hybrid Meetings That Offer the Best of Both Worlds," by Kathleen M. Edwards, CAE, April 2010

As he concluded and sent meeting professionals off to the Expo, Sheahan reiterated his message on compartmentalization with a simple thought: "If you were to pick one element of your annual meeting to innovate, what would that element be?"

Tony Keane, president and CEO of IFMA--International Facility Management Association, recalled an experience at a previous association where the board had signed on for an internationalization plan that would take three to five years to show ROI. Even so, one board member suffered a case of sticker shock at a meeting: "Why are you spending so money on travel expenses?" The board member was expressing the common and not-so-subtle suspicion was that staff wasn't really establishing important roots overseas, but gallivanting at the association's expense.

"You're going to get pushback," Keane says. "You have to be prepared for that."

But what to do? Here are three suggestions that emerged during the morning sessions.

1. Make it the board's initiative, not the CEOs. As with any new initiative that threatens to divide board members, support is better gained through board-member-to-board-member conversations. Champions of a new global plan on the board should consider it their role to persuade fellow board members who are on the fence or opposed to it. "We let [the board members] bring in the naysayers, instead of me going from one person to another," Keane says.

2. Make a clear, direct statement of your global focus, and have the board acknowledge it. At IFMA, Keane helped craft an international strategy with members of the board, former board members, staff, and an international development committee. Once it was created, it was distilled into a strategy statement---just a handful of lines that established the association's commitment to expand it's efforts internationally. The board approved the strategy statement---acknowledging its belief in the association's international mission, not just a particular initiative.

3. Build a board that shows how global you are. Rosa Aronson, CAE, executive director of TESOL International, pointed out that four members of the association's 12-person board are from outside the United States, in keeping with the 27 percent of members who are from outside the United States. "You want to be sure that your board is representative of your membership," she says. "It has some cost and cultural implications, but if you are a truly global association, it has to show up in your governance structure." Aronson added that you should make sure to check your bylaws during the process. Many associations were founded in an era when globalization was unacknowledged (or even actively resisted), so there may be residual language that effectively limits board participation to U.S. members.

How about you? What works when it comes to getting board buy-in for your globalization efforts?

When she and her husband, New York Times correspondent Nicholas Kristof, moved into an apartment in China, they were informed that the apartment was bugged. Poking around, they soon discovered an "electronic sound device" behind a grate. The couple stepped into the bathroom, turned on the shower to cover up their voices, and had a quick huddle. As WuDunn recalled, they had three options.

1. Ignore it---why cause trouble when you don't know how things will go?

2. Destroy it---this was totally inappropriate!

3. Engage with it---acknowledge the bug's existence, but feed it inaccurate information.

As it turned out, the anxiety-inducing device turned out to be an innocuous part of a doorbell mechanism. But as WuDunn laid out China's astounding economic growth, as well as its by-no-means-modest challenges, the questions still linger. Here's a new experience you're unsure about---how do you respond?

As WuDunn pointed out, China can't be ignored: It now claims the second largest global economy, is the second largest importer of energy, and is the largest emitter of greenhouse gasses. More creepily, the nation is also a hub of cyberwarfare activity, as China-based hackers gather information about and gain access to U.S. infrastructure grids.

But economic power, WuDunn pointed out, does not alone make a superpower. That happens through a mix of "hard" power (economics, military) and "soft" power---the kind of cultural production and general social values that are hard to quantify but which matter when it comes to asserting dominance. To that end, the fact that China is hungry for American films but not vice versa isn't a small thing, WuDunn said---it suggests that the United States has resources beyond economic ones.

There's a downside to this, I think: Keeping ahead on the soft power front perpetuates a lack of understanding that complicates international relationships.The lack of a compulsion to understand the culture you're working with---and just assume your culture dominates---can be divisive. "We don't know China very well, which creates uncertainty," WuDunn says. "And uncertainty creates fear." And though she didn't say it, fear historically leads to option number two above.

For a lot of associations looking to make their first steps internationally, be it in China or anywhere else, facing up to such cultural biases may be the most important thing to do. That doesn't mean being Pollyannaish, but aggression (option two) and deceit (option three) are dead ends in the long run. The "ignore" option may be best---that is, speak freely and honestly, but know that your new partners are paying more attention to what you're saying than you might expect.

Would it help to know that one of the most successful retailers in the United States plays that role for its customers?

CNBC profiled bulk retailer Costco in a documentary that aired last night. If you missed it, check out this segment from NBC's Rock Center with Brian Williams (or read the transcript):

The point that caught my attention:

"Despite the idea that customers like more, Costco stocks surprisingly few items, only around 4,000. The lack of selection is deliberate. 'There's only one variety of ketchup,' [marketing consultant Pam] Danziger explains. 'You don't have to choose from a variety. They've edited it down for you. You've paid them to do it.'"

A big-box store that hasn't been performing so well lately is Best Buy. Slate tech writer Farhad Manjoo suggests that Best Buy's overwhelming selection is dragging it down, and he suggests an opposite approach to save the company:

"If Best Buy wants to survive, it's got to replace its hulking, teeming stores with smaller, less crowded, more intimate spaces. When you walk in to buy a 32-inch TV, the guy in the blue shirt shouldn't make you choose between a dozen nearly identical models. Instead, he should show you a single set, a TV that Best Buy's experts have determined offers the best features at the best price. The firm could do the same across its inventory, culling the tech universe down to a few essential, can't-beat products. In this way, Best Buy would transform itself from a supermarket into a boutique—a place with fewer things for sale and lots of friendly, sophisticated, helpful experts who'll save you the hassle of researching your next TV or PC purchase. They'll do all the work for you."

There it is again: curation. Note the similar language: "They've edited it down for you," and "They'll do all the work for you." Capturing, analyzing, evaluating, and organizing the overwhelming volume of choices in the world and presenting it to customers in a useful, manageable way. Making sense of the madness. Finding order from chaos. However you want to put it—in any context, both physical and online, both object and information—consumers derive value from and prove loyal to great curators.

I've written about curation before, and so have many others. I'll leave it here for a Friday afternoon, but I think I'll be revisiting this again soon, so stay tuned.

[Also, on a separate but still association-related note: Costco has 64 million members. At the end of the segment above, reporter Carl Quintanilla notes that "most of their profit is from the [membership] fees themselves" and that 90 percent of Costco members renew every year. Chalk one up for the membership model.]

More millennials. Ryan Crowe is a graduate student and doesn't really know what associations do. You might think that's too bad for him, but he'd argue that that's bad news for you. (Be sure to check the discussion in the comments, too.)

Associations' role in society. Eric Lanke, CAE, just read Shelly and Mark Alcorn's report "The 2012 Association Forecast: Provocative Proposals for Future Change," (which you should probably do, too), and suggests that associations must both learn from the for-profit sector and also re-establish themselves as "a fundamental component of our functioning democracy."

Strategy. Andrea Pellegrino writes that associations should abandon their missions. "[I]n organizations that are struggling to keep members and customers, the organization's mission is often one of the main roadblocks to growth," she writes.

More strategy. Jamie Notter points to a blog post on Harvard Business Review about the downfall of Sony and draws some lessons on why strategies fail when the context around them changes (and how this might be happening to associations.)

Economy. Toronto-based AMC Zzeem conducted a survey of Canadian membership organizations and, similar to findings in a similar study of U.S. associations by ASAE, found that the economic recovery is proving to be a very slow one for associations.

Board size. Jan Masaoka at Blue Avocado answers the question, "what size should our board be?"

Embracing failure. Two weeks after NTEN's 2012 Nonprofit Technology Conference, Executive Director Holly Ross writes a blog post about lessons learned from eight failures at the event. Would your association CEO do that?

Questions. Greg Roth examines the lost art of asking questions.

Facebook Timeline. Maggie McGary says Facebook's Timeline page layout is bad for brand pages and explains why.

Organization. Cindy Butts, CAE, is cleaning up 24 years of clutter in her office and offers some tips for better office organization.

Twitter. Data collected by Dan Zarella shows that tweeting links generates more retweets than does tweeting replies. In other words, broadcasting beats conversation, at least if retweets is your measurement of success.

Information overload. Mark Golden, CAE, explains his mixed emotions about the rise of social media and the minute-by-minute news cycle. He writes that social media is "empowering, but it also creates an elevated need to take personal responsibility for exercising discipline and integrity in drawing your conclusions."

Learning. Kevin Makice at Wired's GeekDad blog takes a close look at the "flipped classroom" model. Lots of ideas here to rethink association learning methods.

Volunteer engagement. Speaking of flipping, Jeffrey Cufaude suggest a new way to approach working with association volunteers and calls it "Flipped Volunteering: The Better Way to Invite and Engage."

Online community. Joshua Paul recommends adopting a 24-hour rule to get a private online community up and running: "an organization must ensure that all discussions are responded to within 24-hours of the initial posting."

Meetings technology. We've come a long way. Corbin Ball documents the highlights of 30+ years of advancements in meetings and events technology.

Apps for lobbyists. Stefanie Reeves, CAE, recommends nine mobile apps for association GR pros.

Harvard Business Review's resident nonprofit provocateur, Dan Pallotta, asks this question about the profession in his latest blog post, "Nonprofit Pathology." I urge you to read the whole post, but here's an excerpt:

"Maybe people get into the compassion business full-time not because they're more compassionate than others but because they're codependent. […] I see people who wear the debilitating lack of resources in their organization like a badge of honor, despite the fact that the deficiency undermines their ability to impact the community problem they are working on. I see people moving from one nonprofit to another, from one cause to another, seemingly more addicted to 'the struggle' than passionate about solving any particular social ill. […] And while they lament it, they have no commitment to doing anything about it. There's a sense of pathological contentment."

Ouch. That's a harsh diagnosis, but it rings true. When good intentions run aground time after time, frustration bleeds into martyrdom, and you can recognize it from a mile away. After hearing "we have to do more with less" enough, it begins to sound more like an excuse than a call to action. I don't think Pallotta means to indict an entire sector of professionals (well, maybe he does), but rather I think he means to point out that too many nonprofit professionals take the easy way out, lamenting the system rather than trying to fix it.

Philanthropic nonprofit work and association management have their similarities, of course, but the two attract a fundamentally different kind of worker that leads to a different strain of "pathology" in associations. Philanthropic organizations draw the bleeding hearts, workers who are stirred by the challenge of direct social or environmental change. Association work is more indirect; associations make the world a better place, too, but they do it by helping other people (doctors, builders, scientists, whoever) be better at what they do. And so association management is often less a profession that is sought out than one that people "fall into."

Meanwhile, associations have a steady pool of customers (members) to a degree that far exceeds any other type of business, for-profit or nonprofit. When you can rest easy in knowing that 80 percent of your customers will give you money every year, that's a comfortable, built-in audience.

What do you get when you put that together with a large pool of professionals who arrived in their jobs by chance? Instead of a workforce driven by a core purpose or an innate will to change the world, you get a workforce that discovers, likes, and comes to depend on the comfort of the status quo. And it goes without saying that comfort breeds complacency. That's the association pathology. We're codependent, too. We need members so we can feel needed.

I've read arguments that the struggle to change is magnified or somehow unique to associations, and generally I chalk that up more to overall human nature. We all hate change. But I can see how the nature of associations makes change an uphill battle. The chips are stacked against us by the inherent structure of the membership model, which is only reinforced by the workforce it engenders.

At the Great Ideas Conference last month, I listened to Shelly Alcorn's summary of her lengthy study of association executives' visions of the future. Her handout listed a series of "provocative proposals," phrased as "what if" questions, that emerged consistently in her study. More than one of them focused on transforming association management into a profession that is sought after rather than fallen into. If we're ever going to break our dependency on membership as we know it, that's going to be a key step.

Here's a snapshot of what some are doing or already have done--and it's not too late to join in yourself!

Start by downloading the free Earth Day 2012 Toolkit , where you can also learn about and be inspired by "A Billion Acts of Green," the world's largest environmental service campaign. And if you're in DC, you may want to check out the massive party scene happening at the National Mall rally and concerts either in person or online (live-streaming at www.earthday.org)

Sounds like some more partying will go on over at the 2012 Mighty Kindness Earth Day Hootenanny on April 22 organized by the Kentucky Chiropractic Association. The fun is combined with a more serious purpose: promoting a new state license "Go Green with Chiropractic" plate that aims "to elevate the chiropractic industry and its environmentally friendly nature in Kentucky" and raise some money as well.

The Eco-Dentistry Association will host its first tweetchat for dental industry professionals and consumers worldwide "to discuss the essentials of a high-tech, wellness based, and successful green dental practice."

The American Bar Association's Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources (SEER) in sponsoring the One Million Trees Project-Right Tree for the Right Place at the Right Time nationwide public service project. Started in March 2009, the project "calls on ABA members to contribute to the goal of planting one million trees across the United States by 2014 - both by planting trees themselves and by contributing to the partnering tree organizations." It also is promoting nominations for the 2012 ABA Award for Excellence in Environmental, Energy, and Resources Stewardship.

Entertainment Cruises is partnering with the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) has partnered with Entertainment Cruises to offer an Earth Day brunch cruise to enjoy Washington, DC, views while learning from the NAAEE about green energy, environmental initiatives and its upcoming conference.

More than 1,000 volunteers of the Student Conservation Association (SCA) are engaging in 10 signature Earth Day projects from prairie re-vegetation to exotic plant species removal on public lands across the U.S. on April 14 and 21. These events have some powerful sponsors, including American Eagle Outfitters, ARAMARK, Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Exelon Foundation, Johnson Controls, Sony, and Southwest Airlines.

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) has released the First Annual Report of the eCycling Leadership Initiative, which details how the consumer electronics industry has dramatically increased its recycling in 2011 and advanced the goals set by the eCycling Leadership Initiative (also called the Billion Pound Challenge). For instance, participants of the initiative arranged for the responsible recycling of 460 million pounds of consumer electronics, a 53% increase over the 300 million pounds recycled in 2010. The number of recycling drop-off locations for consumers also was bolstered from to nearly 7,500 from just over 5,000 a year ago. And CEA launched GreenerGadgets.org to educate consumers about eCycling and energy consumption. By entering a ZIP code, anyone can locate the closest responsible recycling opportunity sponsored by the CE industry and/or third-party certified recycler. The initiative aims to increase electronics recycling to one billion pounds annually by 2016 and providing transparent metrics on eCycling efforts. A billion pounds of unrecycled waste electronics would fill a 71,000-seat NFL stadium.

The American Medical Student Association and Medical Alumni Association at Temple University are planting seeds and preparing a "Medicinal and Edible Learning Garden" and education event to discuss natural medicinal remedies.

The National Parks and Recreation Association is urging people to take advantage of waived entrance fees at U.S. national parks from April 21 to April 29 during National Park Week. Download your free Owner's Guide to America's National Parks. I know a few associations that are planning staff picnics and hikes at local parks and Great Falls National Park in sync with this promotional event.

The New York City Association of Hotel Concierges (NYCAHC) and its affiliate members will celebrate MillionTreesNYC at a "Dig In for Earth Day" tree-planting event May 5 in partnership with Mayor Bloomberg and NYC Parks and New York Restoration Project. Since the program's inception in 2007, thousands of New Yorkers have helped plant over 400,000 trees, with NYCAHC planting more than 2,000 of them.

American Forests' easy online calculator and offsetting options make it easy to offset your home or car pollution (I offset my minivan's emissions for about $17 last year through AF). Earth Day Network also offers an eco-calculator.

Whatever you do, just consider doing something green this weekend and join your colleagues in making the planet a bit healthier for us all!

For $15, cartoonist and artisanal pencil sharpener David Rees will select a pencil for you; sharpen it, lovingly; package it in a handsome protective tube; and send it to you along with a certificate of authenticity and a bag of the shavings.

Put-on? Capitalism at its finest? In an entertaining (and occasionally profane) interview with GQ, Rees insists that what he's doing is more the latter than the former:

It's a real thing! I've sharpened like, getting up on 475 [pencils]. I've made money doing this. It's not just like a silly--it's not like I built the website and then didn't build up the business. I did it, and I invested in my tools, and I learned a [remarkable amount] about pencils. ... I did my research. I learned a lot about pencils. So it's not a goof. It's a real thing.

Yes, its a real thing---further proof that, as they say, the appropriate price for something is what somebody is willing to pay for it. It reminds me of a familiar conversation in association circles about pricing: As a 2010 Associations Now feature pointed out, industry-specific goods and services can be sold at a premium because there's nowhere else to get them.

But are you sure that what you're selling is so special? I don't think any reader of this blog needs another lecture about how the internet has upended meetings, education, membership, and more, but Rees' enterprise has left me wondering how many associations have taken the uncomfortable but necessary step to study what those shifts have meant for their pricing. It may be that a lot of those comfortable revenue drivers are slowly but surely becoming the equivalent of artisanally sharpened pencils---nice enough for what they are, and the result of lots of careful effort to be sure, but easily found at a much lower cost elsewhere.

Ballard is a gifted storyteller and an ardent preservationist, and he argues that instead of removing artifacts from the Titanic wreckage to bring to museums for people to see, people should be taken to the Titanic to see it—but not how you might think. He showed a slide depicting his vision for building a permanent support structure for remote-operated camera equipment around the wreck, enabling visitors at museums on land to view and explore the wreck in real time from thousands of miles away, and he says this "telepresence" technology isn't that far off.

As he talked about the idea, it became clear that we're all fortunate the Titanic was found such a forward thinker. He mentioned the explorers who found the tomb of King Tut in Egypt and said that, if they'd had the foresight to know that the masses might one day be able to easily visit the sites in ancient Egypt—this was before widespread use of airplanes and automobiles—they might not have packed up all the artifacts and sent them to a museum in London. In the same way, thinking about how the world could be brought to the Titanic through technology could help preserve it.

It struck me that that kind of thinking is just what an association needs from its CEO and board of directors: the ability to imagine and plan for not just what is possible now but also what could be possible in the future. When it comes time for long-term planning and developing strategy, an association CEO should guide the board to embrace the anything-is-possible perspective, and it's also a good reason for a nominating committee to seek potential board members who demonstrate that mindset.

The evening spurred a couple other association-related thoughts, as well:

• National Geographic's package for the Titanic anniversary is an example for associations to follow for creating a multifaceted experience around a story or education. The package has included two magazine features, an interactive iPad app, a museum exhibit, a live expert presentation, and two television specials. The question of money and resources is always a challenge, but most associations engage in all of these types of platforms (or similar ones). Few, however, are so skilled at coordinating a package of resources and events across all of them at once.
• If Ballard's vision of a telepresence Titanic museum experience ever comes to life, that will remove just about any excuse associations would have for not creating virtual and hybrid event experiences. If live, interactive video of a shipwreck 12,000 feet below the surface of the ocean could be brought to your computer screen, then surely a presentation in a convention hall could be, as well.

The event was filmed, so keep an eye on the National Geographic Events video library if you're interested. I'll come back and embed or post a link to video once it's up.