Unlocking the Mystery of Meaningful Metrics

By June Pinyo, MA, Content Strategist, AMC Creative Media Services

One of the biggest challenges in the association space can be that, as staff, our business goals and daily tasks mirror those of the corporate world, only without the corporate-sized budgets and resource pools to help us get them accomplished.

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Event Planning: Why You Should Say Yes to that Last-Minute Addition

By Brendan Sugrue, NANN Marketing and Membership Coordinator

Picture this: There are 3 weeks until you leave for your annual meeting. Your schedule is finalized, the keynotes and speakers are accounted for, your marketing campaigns are starting to wrap up, and your staff is now shifting into the “hosting” phase of conference. But then you receive a phone call from a game-changing potential speaker.

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6 Signs Your Association May Need Consulting Expertise

By Susan Farrell Stock, Executive Director, AMC Consulting Services

Regardless of the size or focus of your association, you’ve likely experienced a situation in which you didn’t have the expertise required to tackle a goal in the most effective way. Eventually, most of us encounter situations that could benefit from professional consulting expertise. But how do you know when your association has reached that point? Here are six signs to look for that indicate bringing in external consulting expertise might be right for you:

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Infographic: Defining Transparency in Association Governance

By Kelly Kellermann, Managing Editor, Creative Media Services

How should association leaders respond to member requests for more openness, communication, and accountability from their board of directors? This is the question AMC governance and strategy consultant Anne Cordes and AMC principal Mark Engle, along with Jed R. Mandel, Esq, discussed in their 2016 article on the role of transparency in association governance. While there are several benefits from the policies and practices called for in the name of transparency, it can also do harm when applied without regard for board privacy.

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#Success with Social Media

By Danielle Desjardins, Associate Managing Editor

It’s no secret that social media has taken over the lives of millions—and our many association members are no exception! That’s why AMC clients use this low-cost, high-impact advertising and engagement tool to its fullest with innovative initiatives that truly are worth Tweeting about.

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5 Reasons for Associations to be Optimistic about the New Administration

By Jordan Wildermuth, MSW, Health Policy & Advocacy Manager

As the season of holiday gatherings winds down, I am sure that on more than one occasion a dinner was interrupted by unsolicited political banter. Around the association table, I would like to offer my gift of five reasons to be optimistic for the 115th Congress and the new presidential administration.

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Time to Make our Association New Year’s Resolutions

By Bruce Hammond, CAE

It’s that time of year again – time to light the menorah, decorate the tree, and celebrate the end of what was hopefully a fantastic year! It’s also the time when many people make resolutions for the coming year and plan how they’re going to do things differently to make it even better than the one before.

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Walking to a New Beat: Don’t Let Historical Conference Offerings Hold You Back

By Brendan Sugrue, NANN Marketing and Membership Coordinator

We all fall into the same trap. “This is what we’ve always done,” we say. These are dangerous words for associations. They lead us to complacency and we risk losing our ability to feel fresh to attendees. The National Association of Neonatal Nurses (NANN) recently ran into the same issue – and decided to approach it head on.

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 Ask the Management Team: What books have made a difference in your career?

By AMC

600,000 to 1,000,000.

That’s how many business books are published each year in the U.S. alone, according to a recent Forbes article. How in the world do you know which ones are worth your time?

Queue AMC’s Management Team members, who took the time to share their favorite leadership and business books and articles. If you’re looking for career-impacting reads, you’re in the right place! AMC asked:

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SEO, Marketing and Mohawks: 5 Takeaways from MozCon

By June Pinyo, MA, Content Strategist, AMC Creative Media Services

I’ll be honest. Conferences cause me great anxiety. Working for an association management company has provided me with an “out” in that I’m typically working at the there is a collection of coworkers, familiar faces with whom I’ve some sort of established relationship.

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Four Reasons Your Association Should Embrace Social

By Molly Anderson, NANN Senior Manager, Marketing and Membership

All good content marketers – corporate and nonprofit alike—dream of elusive viral posts and skyrocketing social growth. But how do you get there? How do you find and engage your audience and better yet, elicit likes, shares, and retweets beyond your wildest dreams?

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5 Steps to Special Interest Groups Revitalization

By Taylor Thomas and Amanda Duski, AMC Meetings Assistants

The association world is constantly changing and it’s key to make sure each segment of your association continues to expand and adjust with the current market climate. Special Interest Groups (SIGs) are an important part of any association, and it is essential to revitalize SIG meetings that have become stale over time. The Administrator/Coordinator SIG at Association Management Center recently went through this process and, by using the steps below, had amazing results. The SIG boosted attendance by 30 percent, had increased member engagement, received tons of positive feedback, and had much happier members overall. Consider the following to revamp your SIG today:

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Do This, Not That: Website Edition

By Monica Moore, Senior Web Manager

Better Solutions for Common Web Problems

There are a variety of ways to complete a task on the Web, but some solutions are better than others. While looking at items that are part of a typical Web update routine, I listed below some common web problems, possible solutions, and then much better solutions. Because there are so many ways to address items on a website, these certainly aren’t all the possible solutions, nor are all of the “poor solutions” always incorrect. The goal for any website is to keep things clean, consistent, and engaging. The “better solutions” listed below are recommendations with this intent in mind.

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Who Is Us?

By Bruce Hammond

When reading Seth Godin’s blog post from back in January, Who Is Us?, I got excited. In only four sentences, he spoke volumes about numerous issues associations have had for what seems like forever without ever mentioning our industry.

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AMC to Host August Governance Event

By AMC

Board Performance: Practice Meets Strategy

Join us at the second session of AMC’s three-part Governance series for nonprofit staff executives, where two key strategists will share corporate lessons learned and how their experience translates into organizational performance in the association community. Panelists from the corporate and association worlds will contribute to a robust and engaging discussion.

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How Do I Get Started in Video Marketing?

By Carly Mangus

Quick Tips for Video Preproduction Part 1

You’ve made the decision to start making videos, and now comes the scary part: where do you start?

Right now, the world looks like your oyster. You could go so many ways and do so many things in your new medium. The sheer number of possibilities can make beginning this process seem very daunting. Done properly, video marketing can add personality to your marketing strategy and grow a valuable connection to your audience, as you read in our previous post on video marketing. Before you begin, it’s necessary to narrow your focus by answering a few questions.

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Association Management Center’s Ask The Management Team Question of the Quarter

By AMC

It’s time for the next installment of Associational Management Center’s Ask the Management Team question series. This quarter, we reached out with a question about something everyone can relate to: BUDGET! But instead of focusing on the challenges related to limited budget, we wondered what our executives would do if they had more money to spend. We asked AMC leaders to answer the following question:

If your budget increased by $200,000 for the year, with the expectation all of it must be spent in 2016, where would you invest to make the biggest impact? Why?

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Why Video Content is Important for Your Association

By Carly Mangus, Assistant Editor and Resident Video Editor, Creative Media Services

 

It’s easy to feel lost when it comes to video marketing, especially when what first comes to mind is big-budget commercials produced by large companies. At first glance it looks daunting, but video is more accessible than ever and can be done on a budget.

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Five Considerations When Rebranding Your Association

By Louise Ristau and Liz Giannini, Awards and Personalization Association

Rebranding has been a hot topic in the association community for years, and 2015 is no exception. Associations regularly have been seeking to better understand tips and tricks for effectively rebranding their organizations. Here at AMC, our client, the Awards and Personalization Association recently went through the process and we thought we’d share our experiences with you.

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5 Tips for Operationalizing Your Strategic Plan

By Amanda Pairitz-Campo, MPS, Senior Operations Manager

So you just finished a board meeting and amidst all the generative conversation and decision making, chances are, you have a few action items before the next meeting. It is hopeful that these action items correspond to the strategic plan and will fit nicely into a work plan that already exists. However, this is not always the case and you are now not only tasked with completing the action item, but creating a work plan that links it with the strategic plan to track your work and ensure you reach the board’s requested goal.

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6 Ways to Leverage Your Career Center for Brand Building

By Allison Whitley, Operations Coordinator, AMC Professional Relations & Development team

In 2015, more than 142,000 users visited the career centers of AMC’s client organizations. Of those 142,000 impressions, how many could potentially have been new visitors to the career center, thus providing an opportunity to build your brand during a professional’s first exposure to your organization?

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Creating Fear in Your Event's Non-Attendees - the Good Kind!

By Liz Giannini, Senior Manager, Operations, Awards and Personalization Association

Remember that year you didn’t attend the Annual Conference? The food looked perfect on Instagram. The hashtag blew up Twitter. Your favorite conference buddy was tagged endlessly on Facebook during the new learning labs which were located OUTSIDE in Palm Springs. And…you’ve always wanted to go to Palm Springs…And, the sky was perfectly blue. Nobody was wearing a coat. Everyone was smiling; and earning millions of CE credits while smiling. This feeling that’s welling up inside you? This, my friend, is the fear that you’re missing out or, more commonly referred to as FOMO.

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Wrong Way

By Jordan Wildermuth, MSW, Manager, Health Policy and Advocacy

Sometimes associations take the wrong path, whether it’s in their membership strategy, their marketing strategy, or their advocacy efforts. Whether it happens with leaders fully understanding the situation or by mistake, going down the wrong path obviously isn’t ideal.

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Dealing with Disruption and Competition to the Association Industry – A Q&A With Stephanie Mercado, CAE

By Bruce Hammond, CAE, Senior Manager, Corporate Marketing & Communications

On a monthly basis, AMC’s Management Team holds a meeting that includes a generative discussion on a topic of importance to association leaders. This month, the topic focused on competition to the association industry, and the discussion jumped from innovation to risk to Board composition to the speed at which associations make decisions.

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15 Reflections from the Process of Earning the CAE

By Bruce Hammond, CAE

A few years ago, I sat for the Certified Association Executive exam. Thankfully, I lived to tell about it! Reflecting on the process, the exam, and the post-exam timeframe, here are 15 anecdotes/recommendations/ideas I want to share with anyone preparing for the CAE exam next week or the exam in December (which, if you haven’t started prepping yet, you’ll want to get on that ASAP).

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Ask the Management Team - Question of the Quarter

By Bruce Hammond, CAE, Senior Manager, Corporate Marketing & Communications

On a quarterly basis, we ask our executive level leaders (our Management Team) to provide their insights on a pressing question for the association industry. Here's the next question and answers from a subset of our leadership.

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Healthy Associations Are Healthy Businesses

By Rob Oakes, Business Analyst, AMC Consulting

You can’t fulfill your mission if your business is failing. Your business cannot succeed unless you have a growing base of satisfied customers. In my experience, these two statements are often underappreciated by associations. In fact, as I’ll share, they are sometimes just ignored.

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5 Content Marketing Tips from an Industry Rockstar

By Bruce Hammond, CAE, Senior Operations Manager

She may not have the name recognition of Beyonce or Dave Grohl, but in the content marketing world, Amanda Todorovich is a real rockstar. She is a regular presenter at Content Marketing World and other large industry conferences, and was named a Direct Marketing News 40 Under 40 recipient in 2015. And that’s in addition to her day job – leading the content marketing efforts for the Cleveland Clinic, one of the world’s leading health systems.

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Running the Race for Advocacy

By Jordan Wildermuth, MSW, Manager, Health Policy and Advocacy

Kenyans and Ethiopians have dominated the sport of distance running for many years. What sets them apart from the rest of the field is their technique of pack running. They run in a large group (or pack) and use each other to set the pace, fend off the wind, and conserve energy. Even though they are working together, and the goal of each individual is to try and win the race, they realize that in order to do so they need the help of their teammates.

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5 Steps to Your Very Own Style Guide

By June Pinyo, MA, Managing Editor, AMC Creative Media Services

We hear often about organizations working to “eliminate silos” and encourage collaboration and shared ownership. When it comes to content strategy, this process also can mean increased opportunities for inconsistency, disjointedness, and maybe even conflict.

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Our Top Five Posts of 2015

By Bruce Hammond, Senior Manager, Corporate Marketing & Communications

The year 2015 was a good one for a number of reasons – not the least of which here at AMC is that we launched our blog and began developing and publishing our own unique content on our own website. With more than 220 staff members, there is a lot of leaders within our walls, and we are now better able to share their expertise more consistently with the association community.

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Is Failure Absolute?

By Bruce Hammond, Senior Manager, Corporate Marketing & Communications

In the vast majority of cases, especially in the association industry, the answer is no. While we may not always hit our goals, the overwhelming likelihood is that we haven’t completely (and absolutely) failed.

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Change is the Only Constant

By Sue Farrell Stock, Director, AMC Catalyst Consulting

Creating value is often about embracing change. It’s about exploring options in relation to an organization’s overarching business goals. Here are a concrete example and a number of considerations about how change permeates all of what we do in associations.

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12 Content Marketing Terms to Know

By June Pinyo, MA, Managing Editor, AMC Creative Media Services

Content marketing—let’s start with this one. HubSpot defines content marketing like this:

“a marketing program that centers on creating, publishing, and distributing content for your target audience—usually online—the goal of which is to attract new customers.”

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