“Blown Away” case study discussion
Those of you who have seen the March Associations Now may have noticed several new columns and departments making their debut. One of those departments will be directly connected to Acronym: a series of Associations Now case studies.
Click below to discuss the March case study, “Blown Away," where an association wrestles with what to do when its annual meeting is threatened by a hurricane.
What are your thoughts about Melissa and her approach to the potential crisis? Has your association (or a client of yours) ever dealt with a potential meeting cancellation?
A few questions I’d like to throw out there to get the discussion started:
- What else could Melissa have done to help her executive committee make its decision?
- If the executive committee decides to cancel the annual meeting, what should Melissa do first?
- If the board decides to move forward in the hopes that the hurricane won’t hit, what should Melissa do to prepare for the worst?
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Comments
My association (the Florida Recreation and Park Association) was actually were hit three years in a row with hurricanes. The first year our conference followed on the heels of Hurricane Charley, which was the hurricane that was said to be going one direction and then it shifted and ended up hitting the entire state. So, our delegates were obviously a little anxious about the accuracy of predictions. We started our conference on Sunday, and by Monday our delegates were departing when another storm was bearing down. We never had to "evacuate" anyone because our members are primarily government employees and were immediately called home for emergency response duties. What we did do is to cut the conference short two days, move everything that had to be accomplished up. Some of our folks that left to go home actually turned around and came back to the hotel facility and used it as their evacuation site.
The additional issue was that our entire staff was on-site at the conference, and our office building needed to be prepared for the impending storm - needless to say we had no plan for that either. This was the storm that we cut our teeth on. Flip charts everywhere, making notes as we went.
From that we wrote our emergency manual (which you can find on the ASAE & The Center website). The two storms the two years following, we were much more prepared and organized, and in fact one of the GMs at the site we were at told us he had never seen any group that was so prepared.
Posted by: Eleanor Warmack | March 17, 2008 9:47 AM