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Day 2 of Great Ideas had a great deal to live up to…and certainly did. Today I spent some time going to sessions to further my own development. Attending the “I Think I Know What I Think You Said” with Paul Endress completely opened my eyes. He started off with a true stumper. “The result of the communication is the responsibility of the communicator”. So many times we get frustrated with people for not understanding how something we said could be misinterpreted without ignoring the best way to divulge the information to people who have different representational systems: auditory, visual, etc. If we can appeal to their systems we can build rapport giving us an even further communication advantage.

We learned ways our unconscious mind is our most important ally in communication. In doing an exercise where we tried to mirror a partner when speaking with them it came incredibly more naturally than you would think. It seems our mind takes control and attempts to make communication situations even easier for us.

Then of course “ran” to the session called “The Value of Associations in Challenging Economic Times” led by Monica Dignam, anxious to study the results of ASAE’s survey of 97 associations and how they are dealing with the difficult economic times. Now there was some bad news as well as some good news. It seems a number of organizations membership is doing ok during the time, despite everyone’s initial thought that it would be hurting. Doing a quick survey of the room you could tell the main concern with everyone is conference attendance with travel budgets being slashed or frozen. However, another fact that rose to the forefront was that one of the most valuable things members feel the organizations provide is networking and the one place we should all try to market are the networking opportunities our meetings provide. This year might require a different approach to our marketing campaigns in the past; it’s now time for us to put in black and white the “take aways” from the conference and not so much the social events. It looks as though ASAE will be doing the study again in June, so it will be interesting to see how the results differ.

The session took an interesting turn once the results were reviewed the audience began bring forth their own ideas. We learned ways groups are attacking marketing pushing education and not the parties, how they are working with hotels to avoid attrition offering scholarships for registration getting them into the contracted hotels to take up those rooms. This was truly an exchange of ideas session and looking around the room hearing the concerns of fellow association execs it’s obvious we can all learn A LOT from each other and these sessions have provided a great face-to-face "share point".