Frustrated by unanswered e-mail?

A friend sent me a link to this article posted on Linkedin.  It's an article written by Adam Grant, a professor from Wharton. Since most of us have experienced sending an e-mail into a black hole either in our professional or personal life, I found some of his suggestions intriguing.  Like many good articles, the reader needs to realize that some circumstances allow for this approach while others may not.  It's important to recognize your relationship to the intended recipient and anticipate there may be repercussions if the creativity is not well received.  However, in most cases the reality is "what have you got to lose?" What do you think? http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130624114114-69244073-6-ways-to-get-me-to-email-you-back

Learning from Other’s (Best Practices)

Like many of you, I have always enjoyed when a new program or initiative is a great success.  Of course I don’t always disclose the fact I borrowed the idea from someone else. I don’t feel guilty about it as I didn’t exactly commit copyright infringement.  I have always felt challenged seeing the success others have enjoyed and trying to figure out if and how that successful best practice might apply to my organization. For instance, if I am organizing an event for a group that is focused on diet and exercise I probably will not organize a make your own sundae fundraiser. However, if I organize a trade show and conference, I may borrow an idea from another successful national event like a sports tournament.

I recently learned USA Volleyball sponsors and organizes various successful national events each year.  I wanted to look at how they do it and see what I can borrow when organizing a large national trade show and conference. One thing I learned is they focus on what they are good at and select professional outside vendors to assist with the unrelated yet very important elements that are necessary to make their program a success. 

I learned USA Volleyball hires a tournament housing services company to assist them with their housing needs.  That makes sense and enables USA Volleyball to focus on inviting teams, setting up brackets, hiring officials and all the other things that go in to making it a successful event. The tournament housing services company can take care of meeting all their housing needs from selecting appropriate housing sites, negotiating rates, negotiating contracts, attrition and all the other non-volleyball issues that may come up.

So I went looking for a company that can do that for my association and I found Omnia.  Omnia Housing Services can do the same thing for my association trade show that USA Volleyball gets from their housing services provider. I can feel pretty confident about that because Omnia is managed by the same professionals and modeled after the same company that provides this service to USA Volleyball.  If you’d like to learn more visit http://www.ohsweb.org/index.html or post a comment or question here and I’ll get the information you need.

What is the right level of dues for my members?

Here is a question I see posted frequently on ASAE communities, LinkedIn Groups and a variety of other sources where membership dues are a hot topic.  While I have seen some great responses that provide guidance, there is no right answer just as there is no wrong answer.  I believe the best answer or solution is based on your organization: its mission, its non dues revenue sources, the makeup of its membership base, and other variables. Consider these variables.  Does your organization need members or does it need membership dues to be successful?  Are dues 25% of your total annual revenue or 75%? Is your member segment dominated by a few large companies or countless thousands of small and medium size companies?  So do your homework and seek guidance from your peers, but keep things in perspective and recognize not all successful programs or insightful suggestions will apply to your organization. While access to this wealth of knowledge and experience can provide guidance, proceed with caution and remember, one size never fits all.

Conference Housing Services

When thinking about services you can outsource, consider meeting and conference housing services.  The more I learned about professionals that specialized in the housing services industry the more I felt we were not using our resources or our members’ resources wisely.  We spent a great deal of staff time researching hotels and conference centers. We also devoted a great deal of time negotiating for the other services we needed to make our conference a success.  I recently learned about all the things we were doing wrong and decided going forward I’ll leave this important area in our meeting planning to the experts.  Here is one company that does it well: http://www.ohsweb.org/index.html