Association Transformation

Send us Fan Mail You’ve heard the debate: Association CEOs should come from industry. Others insist the chief staff executive should be a tested nonprofit leader. Well, we found a unicorn who breaks all the stereotypes. Elisa and Andrew are joined by Terry Baker, CEO of the Society of American Foresters, who reminds us that leadership success isn't based on industry versus association but rat...

Send us Fan Mail New to the Chief Brand Experience Officer role, Allison N. Marrero visits the Association Transformation studios to pull back the curtain on her work as a “change junky.” Join Andrew and Elisa for this engaging and energetic discussion on the evolution of the American Society of Interior Designers. #ASID’s Jessica Irizarry adds her perspective on the impact of change and the poten...

Send us Fan Mail Has the “rubber band of change” snapped? Dana Aragon of the National Society of Professional Engineers joins us for a broad and triggering conversation. From the band-aids of innovation used to get associations through the last 36 months to nonprofits reverting to the “way things have always been done”. Elisa, Andrew, and Dana deconstruct the association model and discuss how to s...

Send us Fan Mail What are the emerging trends and priorities impacting membership bodies in 2023? Elisa and Andrew take a look at the challenges and opportunities which they suggest leadership teams should be exploring in the year ahead. Support the show

Send us Fan Mail All boards know that strategy is important; but almost all also find it daunting. Planning forces directors to confront a future they can only guess at. Worse, actually choosing a strategy entails making decisions that explicitly cut off possibilities and options, and a board may well fear that getting those decisions wrong will wreck their organisation's chances of long-term...

Send us Fan Mail A hundred years ago, we moved from working six day weeks to five, and we’re overdue for an update. As we progress through the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the 4-day week is a proposed reduction in the work week from a standard 40 hours to 32 hours for the same pay and benefits. Through a variety of pilots across the world, this reduction has been proven to work for employees and...

Send us Fan Mail Association management is a vocation; it is a profession; and for an increasing number of people, it is a career choice. It is a craft which requires a complex mix of skills, knowledge, and experience, dexterously combining knowledge of association culture, structure, and politics, with a whole spectrum of professional expertise, ranging from strategy and advocacy to marketing and...

Send us Fan Mail Constructive relationships amongst association leadership are fundamental to an organisation's success but too often we've seen tensions emerge between volunteer leaders and association professionals. Unless we invest in our relationships, it can be far too easy for an association's leadership team to descend into an emotional quagmire. Elisa and Andrew explore the...

Send us Fan Mail At this year's ASAE Annual Meeting, keynote speaker Marcus Whitney encouraged association professionals to reexamine their perception of innovation and offered practical lessons on how organizations could be creative and goal-oriented. But what else did we learn from #ASAE22? Elisa and Andrew are joined by association community specialist, blogger, and fellow podcaster, Kiki...

Send us Fan Mail After two years of unprecedented change for individuals and organizations both societally and globally, with their 2022 State of Membership Survey Fonteva wanted to learn not just about where associations have been, but where they are going. Many associations have adapted and evolved as the needs and expectations of their members have changed and many have stepped into numerous ro...

Send us Fan Mail The Entomological Society of America (ESA) is a non-partisan scientific organization which represents a broad spectrum of opinions united under one principle: the promotion and advancement of scientific inquiry, discovery, and communication. Within the context of its diverse membership, the ESA has devised a successful approach to engaging in topics of broad  social interest, incl...

Send us Fan Mail Maintaining diverse income streams is (or should be) a ubiquitous priority for association leaders. While the pandemic focused our attention on new approaches to securing non-dues revenue, post-pandemic it is incumbent on us to to sustain partnerships and innovations that underpin financial strength, promote business resilience, and support the development of an equally diverse va...

Send us Fan Mail This week's episode is sponsored by our friends at Cambridge Publishing Ltd (www.cpl.co.uk). Elisa and Andrew are joined by Martin Bewick, Senior Content Strategist at CPL to explore the value of devising an association's content strategy and the impact of cultivating a content culture.  There is no single 'right' model and Martin helps us understand the proces...

Send us Fan Mail How's life in Association World? What are the priorities? What are we talking about and what should we be talking about? This week Elisa and Andrew spend time exploring the subjects that pique their interest as they reflect on the ongoing development and focus of membership organisations since launching Association Transformation nearly two years ago. Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Salesforce recently published its 7th annual report on marketing within the global nonprofit environment. Over 8,200 marketing professional from more than 30 countries were surveyed on the shifts which have occurred in marketing strategies, priorities, and challenges during 2021. It makes insightful reading and this week Elisa and Andrew are joined by marketing specialists Lorrain...

Send us Fan Mail Ahead of their session at the this year's ASAE's annual meeting in Nashville, Jessica Irizarry, Michelle Runge, and Elisa share their views with Andrew on the imperative to elevate awareness of and appreciation for the centrality of component relations amongst associations.  Register for the 2022 ASAE Annual Meeting at https://annual.asaecenter.org/index.cfm.  Support th...

Send us Fan Mail Organizations that employ the strategy of Continuous Disruptive Innovation (CDI) are a rare breed. They require disruptive leadership teams who create tremendous long-term value by nurturing periods of sustained ideation and value creation. They build platforms or networks that give rise to the development of a series of offerings, each of which creates further disruption within a...

Send us Fan Mail The last two years have seen unprecedented disruption across the world and businesses have had to adapt to survive. In 2017, McKinsey wrote a report called the Five Trademarks of Agile Organisation. Today's guests, Marcia Philpin explains how she adapted the five trademarks and developed the FPM's House of Agile to nurture, sustain, and grow the FPM during the pandemic....

Send us Fan Mail When he defined the concept of "attention economics" in 1971, Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon wrote that "...a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention...".  50 years later, and in a data-rich world, the overwhelming wealth of information available to us means a dearth of something else, i.e. the scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes...

Send us Fan Mail Exposure to fresh perspectives, new ways of doing things, alternative solutions, peer networks, and creative ideas is fundamentally every association's core purpose; and building and capitalising on an international network is an effective way of delivering against an association's mission. But many association leaders grapple with international business development, not...

Send us Fan Mail Storytelling is humanity’s oldest technology for connection, identity, and sense making. And today it’s the mission-critical competency for knowledge-era leaders. The world's most influential leaders are telling stories, including association leaders and Elisa and Andrew are joined by the Storyteller Leader, David Hutchens and discuss how to bring the power of authentic human...

Send us Fan Mail 2021 was a tough one. Tougher than many of us expected. But there were still plenty of highlights and successes, and there's a lot to look forward to in 2022. In the Season 3 opener, Elisa and Andrew reflect on the big takeaways from 2021 and explore what's exciting them in the membership world for the year ahead. Welcome back to Association Transformation! Support the s...

Send us Fan Mail They call it the "great resignation" but is it really going to turn out to be that? Certainly, as with so many professions, post-pandemic, association executives are reassessing their priorities, reexamining their career paths, and rethinking what it is that they want from work. Bob Corlett, Founder & President of Staffing Advisors joins Elisa and Andrew to explore t...

Send us Fan Mail Neuro-Linguistic Programming is the practice of understanding how people organise their thinking, feeling, language and behaviour to produce the results they do. It's been defined as the “users manual for your mind” because studying NLP gives us insights into how our thinking patterns can affect every aspect of our lives, including in our roles as association leaders. We mark...

Send us Fan Mail Since last year's Associations Week, it's fair to say that the membership sector has more than proven itself adept at managing change. There's no doubt that associations have demonstrated their worth as creative, adaptive, flexible, innovative, ambitious, and responsive focal points of many professional communities. But at what cost? Heightened member expectations,...