Acronym

One week after arriving home from ASAE & The Center’s Annual Meeting in San Diego, we are just beginning to process the things we learned and how we might apply it here at the American Ceramic Society.

For those of us who have attended more than one of these meetings, the 2008 Meeting seemed like a much more personal experience than 2007. Scott, who has a wide network of association friends and colleagues, was in hog heaven. But all of us seemed to meet more people and connect with each other more deeply. We think that the design and setting of this meeting really contributed to building a sense of community – the lounges in the member experience area, the multiple seating areas (including the outdoor lounge!), the close proximity of many of the hotels, the wonderful social events, and the beauty of San Diego all seemed to work together to get people to interact.

All of us came back buzzing about the experience, but we are also committed to applying what we learned. The day after we arrived back in Columbus, we had a full staff retreat, so those of us who attended the meeting were able to share many of the ideas in the context of our planning process for the coming year. We also started conversations within our departments about how the things we learned might be applied to specific challenges we are facing.

Clearly, for us, bringing a team to a meeting like this makes a lot of sense. We had a representative from each department, which allowed us were able to spread out to cover far more sessions, compare what we learned, and build on our shared experiences. We were also able to use the expo as a resource better than we ever have. We are already in touch with some of the companies we encountered about products and services that could enhance our annual meeting in October. We solicited proposals for upcoming meetings from more than half a dozen CVBs (we brought spec sheets with us). In addition, we are exploring specific social networking tools we saw on the expo floor that might provide good solutions for initiatives already on the drawing board.

In our next (and last) post, we will share some of the many specific things we learned at the meeting and what we are planning to do as a result.

- The ACerS Team (Scott, Laura, Liz, Megan, and Peter)