LeaderConnect

Content They’ll Pay For

Rebecca Rolfes — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:40:42 +0000

I predicted that this would be the year of the virtual event and I was right, or right-ish. Associations have embraced virtual events in the form of webinars but they have not gone the full route to virtual conferences. Those that have tried the larger format have concentrated over much on the trade show floor—where virtual [...]

Don’t Veto a Great Idea

Rebecca Rolfes — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:04:01 +0000

Laying on the bedroom floor this morning doing crunches, I heard the new chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts on NPR. Rocco Landesman, the 10th chairman of the NEA, is a Broadway theater producer, responsible for such mega hits as The Producers and Angels in America. He’s used to getting things done. Running a [...]

Should Association Executives Serve or Lead?

Rebecca Rolfes — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:18:10 +0000

I started asking association executives that question several months ago. You have to serve today’s members if for no other reason than, as one of them said, “that’s what pays the bills.” If you get too far out in front of them, you risk irrelevance in the face of the issues they face today. But [...]

Smartest Things in October

Rebecca Rolfes — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:40:38 +0000

This month’s installment of the smartest things for associations includes the excellent news that fall meeting and conference attendance rebounded. Most associations were down 40% or so in the spring but saw attendance rise and had only about a 25% decline from the previous year. If we’d never seen 40%, 25% would look disastrous but, [...]

Finding the New Pots of Association Gold

Rebecca Rolfes — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:43:56 +0000

As I said yesterday (echoing everyone else in the universe): print is dying. There’s even a tweet dedicated to it. And one of the big reasons for that long, painful demise is the decline of print advertising and digital media’s inability to recreate a comfortable stream of ad dollars. Online ads are too easy to [...]

Saving Association Print Magazines

Rebecca Rolfes — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:46:05 +0000

Print is under siege! Chances are you’ve heard that already. If you’re in the publishing business, you’ve heard it so often that you’ve started to believe that the Grim Reaper will appear in full regalia at your office door any moment. Association print magazines are not immune to the trend, of course. They still have [...]

Fun with Power Point

Rebecca Rolfes — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:01:58 +0000

Getting ready for a huge presentation, I have spent the last two weeks building slides. Endless hours (and I do mean endless) of fun with Power Point, Visio, Word, tables, diagrams, clip art, bullet points. I may start dreaming in Venn diagrams. We’ve all sat through bad presentations, reminiscent of Ben Stein’s economics teacher in [...]

What’s Your Problem

Rebecca Rolfes — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:57:55 +0000

I spent Monday and Tuesday at the PMI North American Global Congress in Orlando. T. Boone Pickens was the keynote. The 81-year-old “Oracle of Oil” has not slowed down much. He’s on his fourth wife and his eighth publically traded company. His topic was lessening the United States’ dependence on foreign oil. Pickens met with [...]

Association Voices Heard

Rebecca Rolfes — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 20:21:46 +0000

Trust in business is at an all-time low but interest in public policy is at all-time high. We don’t trust drug companies, for instance, or insurance companies or healthcare providers—but we can’t get enough of discussion about healthcare reform. Associations can be a major force in providing trusted sources of information while advancing their own [...]

Association Clout

Rebecca Rolfes — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:44:03 +0000

I’m working on a speech and am trying to build a value chain slide for the association. An association executive showed me her existing strategy map last weekend before sending out an RFP for a strategic planning consultant. Thinking about those two things together, I wondered what was missing, why neither of these two things [...]