I greatly enjoyed the recent CSAE seminar on Trends and Best Practices for Associations (and many of them apply to other kinds of non-profit organizations).
The world is changing and we all have to adapt - or deal with (unpleasant) consequences!
The 7 measures of success study done with Jim Collins as the advisor (author of famous business bestseller Good to Great) was also quite interesting, I will probably do a separate post on that one.
Here is a short recap of 8 Super Trends discussed:
1. Demassification (break-up of the mass market).
(And this word sounds made-up to me. I prefer "mass customization")
The mass market is breaking into smaller pieces, as differences in lifestyles, preferences, and priorities further segment the population. Members and prospective members alike are interested in focused efforts to meet the needs of their smaller, more specialized groups, not in a one- size-fits-all package of association products and services.
(I am definitely seeing this trend. One very cool idea we are working on in our Wild Apricot system which will help to support this notion is a tagging concept - to let people "tag" member records and events just like they tag pictures on Flickr or bookmarks on Del.icio.us)
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