I'm here in Dallas, Texas, speaking at the TSAE Annual Conference on the MGI 2010 Membership Benchmarking Study. This is my first time to a TSAE event - and what a great event. I saw some old friends from ASAE, and met several new ones like Chris Heaton of TMP, Chelsey Robles of TNLA, Bill McCausland of Texas Exes and his lovely wife, Asha Desai of AARC, Simeon May of NACBA, Scott Blech of EMDRIA, Cahterine Lee of TLA, and list goes on. All warm and interesting people.
Real pros as I like to say.
Whenever I speak I always learn something new or am blessed with the opportunity of "relearning" something...old. Or perhaps "old" is not the right word in this case...simple common sense. As many of you who have seen me talk know, for good or bad, about 80% of what I have to say is very planned out...it's that 20% 'wild card' that sometimes offers either the greatest embarrassment or the greatest success. In this case I'm happy to say...greatest success.
While I presented on the results of the study, it was interesting to note that there seemed to be one very common problem among the 35 or so membership executives/pros who came to my session: communication. Did not matter if the association was membership or trade, large or small, state based or international. Most of the issues we ended up talking about were on communication between the association and members, members and members, and the association staff and itself.
So, the end game of this post is to take a lead from my personal 'Aha' moment. At the end of the day, there are no problems that can't be solved by good, solid communication. It sounds naive - even as I wrote it I thought "good grief, is this best you can do?" But, it is that simple. Its the exchange of ideas that offer the support and guidance that most of our members are looking for. Are there exceptions? Of course. But, I do believe that most of the time our greatest problems come from a lack of communication and can only be solved with an abundance of communication.
Have a great day!
We were attending an event here and my friend left out abruptly due to something being caught in her throat, and their staff team was outside with water, trying to assist her any way possible.
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