Acronym

Peter O'Neil and Shawn Lea each mentioned the Great Ideas Conference in recent posts. I should mention that Acronym will be your place to keep up with the conference as me and a few others will be blogging from there.

We'll also whet the appetite so to speak with some preconference coverage. In that spirit, for the next seven days I will offer up one idea each day. I won't have the audacity to call them "great" though. You'll have to judge if they're useful or not.

And another disclaimer — I'm not saying these are necessarily original ideas. In fact, the first idea is to steal ideas. Before you roll your eyes at the blindingly obvious, allow me to clarify: actively and passionately steal ideas. Take notice of what catches your attention and analyze and find something to use in it. Why does Lost or Law and Order grab your attention? Action, mystery, brain teasers... are these things you can think about when you're trying to grab your members' attention?

When you're at a gathering where most of the people are new to you, assess who seems to have power in the room. What clues signify this and is there something in their approach you can use when you're in front of your volunteers or staffs?

Everything — everything — in the world around you is inspiration.