The future of books is bookless, or maybe it’s just the future of libraries. Stanford’s new engineering library was built to hold 85% fewer books. 85%! A study before the construction showed that most of the collection had not been off the shelves in 5 years. The university says that it can envision the day [...]

Some of the best ideas out there come from small associations. There’s nothing like being a staff of one to focus the mind and make you come up with creative ways of getting things done. At the ASAE Membership and Marketing Conference last week, associations were talking about crowd sourcing, member segmentation and all sorts [...]

What would you do if someone offered you $1.3 million? And they’re not a Nigerian prince. Jump up and down singing We’re in the Money? That’s what I’d do. But if you had too many emails and text messages and RSS feeds on too many devices, you might miss it entirely. That’s what happened to [...]

Halfway through my roster of speeches and two themes are emerging: 1. We still don’t have any money but we’re not contemplating a leap off the roof anymore. 2. We have a long list of what we’d like to do next but everything is vying to be first. The economic recovery is slowly making its [...]

Full disclosure to start: I print every one of these links out and read them on paper as I prepare a blog post. I just don’t like reading on the screen. The screen is for work; paper is for reading. As we continue in the inexorable march toward e-readers rather than print, I will be [...]

That’s what we call my mother. She’ll be 84 next month. She watches the Olympics online. She’s on Facebook (great way to spy on her grandchildren). She was on Twitter but that proved a bit much. Her Google toolbar is her best friend. When I tell people this, the reaction is “Wow!” or “Good for [...]

I predicted that this would be the year of the virtual event and I was right, or right-ish. Associations have embraced virtual events in the form of webinars but they have not gone the full route to virtual conferences. Those that have tried the larger format have concentrated over much on the trade show floor—where [...]

View the information presented by Rebecca Rolfes, executive director of Association Growth Partners, in the recent Higher Logic webinar: “Managing Online Communities.” You may download the presentation by clicking the “menu” button below. Managing Online Communities: A webinar for association leaders View more documents from Imagination Publishing.

Every designer on my staff has a copy of Edward Tufte’s book Envisioning Information. I’ve found nothing better about how design serves information and what that means to the relationship between editors and designers. Tufte has an interesting article in the current issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review called How Facts Change Everything (If [...]

McKinley Marketing, which shares space with the Association Forum of Chicagoland, just published the results of a study about associations and the economy. Not surprisingly, associations envision downturns in meeting attendance and sponsorships and plan budget cuts and possibly layoffs. What caught my attention are Key Finding #5 and Key Finding #6. #5 says that direct mail, [...]