Aptify

I have had the pleasure of working in the association industry for a very long time and remember when business analytics consisted of relatively few metrics like:

• Is our membership growing or declining?
• How many Active v. Associate v. Student v. Inactive v. Retired members do we have?
• Are we tracking to budget?

You get the picture. The ability to pull information was limited to a few variables which generally took hours if not days to compile in spite of a centralized data repository. By the time the information was ready for presentation it was stale…but it was the best ...

I was IM’ing with a colleague the other day and we were lamenting about the overwhelming amount of work we have. Not actually the amount of work, because we both love what we do, but rather an inability to focus on the task at hand when there are so many concurrent needs all seeming to require immediate attention.

This made me begin to wonder why everyone seems to be effective at multitasking but me.

After giving this some thought…

While driving home, wondering about a recent less than positive experience, thinking about dinner, wondering if I should stop and ...

I remember in the mid nineties when websites started to get popular. Associations hadn’t yet really understood how to use a web site, but everyone wanted one.  I think we’re a bit further along the curve today with Social Media, but the similarities are interesting. 

I have heard time and again from very strategically focused Association leaders: ‘We need to have a Social Media presence.’ Really? Why? What thought has been given to creating a social media presence? Before you haphazardly promote a public persona which could inadvertently suggest your association as dysfunctional, why not take the time to really ...

Compared to many of you I am probably considered a Luddite, but that is simply not the case. Granted, I can’t code and terms like DRM, OLAP & IEEE 802.20 standards send me scrambling to Google or Wikipedia, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a great appreciation for technology and what it can do for associations.

I read practically everything I could get my hands on during the last month of 2011 hoping to glean some interesting concepts that would impact the association profession in 2012. I could bombard you with a list of fifty cool things to ...

Government Relations staff members are usually not focused on association operations and often times they don’t even use the same database. There are indeed requirements for a GR professional that demand the use of specialized software and there are many great options out there to help. From our viewpoint though, it is important to pull back information into the AMS system and push data from the AMS into the GR package to maximize the impact in both areas.

First off, let’s talk about engagement – one of the prime reasons companies and individuals join certain associations is the impact that ...