Strategies for Tomorrow’s Innovative Associations

Association management company MCI Benelux has published a remarkable Whitepaper: Strategies for tomorrow’s Innovative Associations as a result of an survey among 450 trade and professional associations. No less than 8 strategies to ensure future relevance have been defined and what’s more scrutinized thoroughly:
• Set a sustainable framework,
• Position your association as a thought leader
• Demonstrate value and relevance to members
• Develop new initiatives and revenue streams
• Constantly innovate
• Extend your outreach through partnerships and alliances
• Communicate, communicate, communicate
• Invest in future leaders

The analysis is not only inspiring, at times it is Sharp and forewarning: “We would advise associations to guard against complacency. We believe we are seeing a trend towards greater competition in an increasingly crowded association marketplace and only those associations with a clearly differentiated vision, strategy and structure are likely to survive in the longer-term.”

New times imply new ways of thinking and acting. The overall conclusion is: “Associations must be the authoritative source of knowledge and industry and policy intelligence and be seen as the thought leader in their sectors if they are to be a credible and respected interlocutor with industry, members, policy-makers and regulators.”
Definitely a mustread for every Association Executive.

MCI rapport http://www.mci-group.com/~/media/MCI/Files/WhitePapers/amc_whitepaper_161210.ashx

Hello Association management 2011

[This post is about getting this blog back on track: I will be slow on using it, meanwhile do follow me on twitter @2Mpact ]

It has been a while since I posted an item on this blog. The original scope was clear and simple: I gave myself one year (2010) to find an anwser to the question: Will the internet replace associations ?

The result of that investigation can be summed up as follows: 80 posts on this blog, an exciting trip to Los Angeles for the ASAE Annual Meeting (resulting in 3 posts: 1 - 2 – 3 ) and before silence set in on this blog, a very important conclusion. Work shifted to the operational level: promoting the Belgian Society of Association Executives (with at this moment 150 members) and publishing Zeppos, a bi-weekly newsletter on association management resulting in 11 editions in 2010, the last being a 32-pager with 100 items on association management in general, trens, quotes, tips… (PDF, in dutch).

And of course: an answer to the big question: NO ! Associations should embrace the important possibilities of the internet to become even more awesome ! This made me decide to change the subtitle of this blog.

For 2011 I plan to invest a lot of time in the growth of BSAE, focussing on improving awareness of the importance of association management and thereby empowering the association executives. And last but not least I plan to put my detailled thoughts in writing (my L.A. Mojo). In this respect I will still use this blog, although it may be more sporadically.

Meanwhile, I will continue using twitter to share all the wonderful stuff I find on the internet so if you are interested: follow me on http://www.twitter.com/2mpact (I try to keep it in English when it’s about association management).

(MM, 16 Jan 2011)