Acronym

We're proud to announce that Acronym has been honored with an EXCEL Award from the Society of National Association Publications, in the category of online publishing--blogs (surprisingly enough). We're very happy to have hosted the kinds of posts--from volunteers like Virgil Carter, Jason Della Rocca, Betsy Boyd-Flynn, Garen Distelhorst, Brynn Gumstrop Slate, Kevin Mead, and many others--that SNAP's judges found to be worthy of recognition.

We're especially proud to have been put in the great company of our fellow category winners, ShopFloor (the National Association of Manufacturers' blog), BoardBuzz (the National School Boards Association's blog), and The Penn Stater's Italy blog (from the Penn State Alumni Association).

Congratulations to all the winners of the Excel Awards--and congratulations to SNAP, for putting on a very enjoyable awards program this year.

Well, it’s time to move on—again! After six years at ASME, I’m retiring July 2, and my wife and I are reinventing ourselves for a fifth time. After a year’s participation on Acronym, this will be my last article. I have this perspective that every 5-8 years I need to move on and find something new and innovative to do. All of us are different, but this is one way I stay challenged and energized. Between now and July 2, there are many final activities at ASME to conclude, including taking my president to Western Europe in a few days for development of alliances and outreach activities. Thus, my time to blog new thoughts will be very limited.

Merle and I are going back to our place in Chadds Ford, west of Philadelphia, where I will do some things that I have long wanted to do: paint full time, teach art, self publish guide books of historic areas in the western Philadelphia area (with my paintings as illustrations), redo the herb garden, design a new house, and maybe, just maybe, do some consulting in association management. We’ll see. One thing is for sure: it will be an exciting and wonderful time of exploration and new discovery.

Folks have asked me what I consider to be my major achievement. It’s one of those common questions asked of retirees. My answer is simple--association management is a wonderful field, full of extraordinary people. Working with so many wonderful volunteers and staff is the achievement I treasure most.

Association management is not for everyone, of course, but it is an important and rewarding endeavor. I’ve been an army officer, practicing architect, university administrator and tenured faculty member, and, thanks to the invitation of a good friend in 1989, a senior association executive. I can’t think of anything as challenging and rewarding as association management. The non-profit sector is an important and significant contributor to the improvement of work, quality of life and personal well-being. Non-profit leadership is hard, but worthwhile and important work.

I want to thank Lisa and Scott for allowing me to participate as a contributor to Acronym. It’s a great blog and fine resource for ASAE. I’ve enjoyed my time here and the many conversations with colleagues.

Merle and I send all of you our very best wishes. I consider myself fortunate to have worked with and learned so much from so many of you. Keep up the fine work.

If you are interested in painting or need a guidebook for the historic areas in Delaware, Chester and Lancaster Counties, just let us know. If you’re in the area of Chadds Ford, stop by and we’ll have some lemonade on the back porch. Cheers!

For those of you interested in the documents Virgil Carter mentioned in his recent post "So You Want to Be an Executive Director?" there are now live links to both documents included in the post. My apologies for the delay--there were some technical difficulties to be worked out, but now they are solved, thanks to the patient help of Amy Hissrich in our web department.

Thank you for your patience, and thanks to Virgil for sharing such great information!

We've had a lot of new association blogs lately! This one, however, has a special focus on establishing and sustaining international business for your association: GrowingGlobally.org. Peter Turner of the opensource.association blog is the featured writer, so you know there's going to be some great and thought-provoking posts. As a good example, check out this recent post in response to Acronym's series of posts from the Study Mission to India.

Peter, good luck with this new endeavor!

I'd like to welcome two new bloggers to the Acronym crew: Brynn Grumstrup Slate and Garen Distelhorst. Brynn is manager of communications and programs for the National Association of Women Business Owners in McLean, Virginia; Garen is accreditation manager for the Marble Institute of America. Both are active members of ASAE & The Center's Young Professionals Committee.

We're excited to have Brynn and Garen as part of Acronym. Please welcome them both!

If you haven’t heard of memes (or you’ve seen the word used and don’t know exactly what it’s referring to), they’re sort of like internet chain letters. Someone will start a meme on his or her blog—for instance, answer a series of questions, or list the first 10 songs that show up in her iPod on “shuffle” mode. Then he or she will “tag” a series of other people, asking them to do the same thing on their own blogs. (I’ve also seen this done via e-mail.)

A lot of memes are fun, get-to-know-you activities. Sometimes they’re more serious, like raising a difficult question and asking others to blog about it.

A meme has been making the rounds in the association blogging community recently, with bloggers sharing eight things about themselves that their readers might not know. Participants so far have included Cindy Butts, Kevin Holland, Matt Baehr, and Maddie Grant. Maddie “tagged” Scott Briscoe and I, asking us to share our eight things. While Acronym doesn’t usually include more personal posts from our bloggers, we thought this could be a fun exception.

That said, here are my eight things:

1. Two of my uncles played in a band with Bruce Springsteen when they were teenagers (I believe they practiced, at least sometimes, in my grandparents’ garage).

2. My father stood my mother up on their first date. He had to come up with really good concert tickets to get a second date.

3. My brother Alex was born on my third birthday. Apparently I was not gracious about sharing my day with him at the time—but now it’s a lot of fun to be able to call him on our birthday.

4. I have two children: Gray is seven and Meredith is almost two. Gray wants to be a member of IGDA when he grows up; Meredith remains undecided.

5. I’ve been a vegetarian for more than 10 years now. If it is ever revealed to me that Diet Coke is not vegetarian, I would have a very difficult decision to make.

6. As Scott will tell you, I am many different kinds of geek. It was imprinted on me early. Some of my first memories are of watching Star Trek with my father (original series, episodes “Shore Leave” and “The Squire of Gothos,” for those who are curious) and some of the first books I can specifically remember reading are The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

7. I’m always reading. One of my favorite things as a child was to spend the day wandering the aisles at the Virginia Beach Central Library, reading any book I wanted for as long as I wanted.

8. We recently lost our wonderful German Shepherd, Cassie. We still have three cats; Christopher, the oldest, is 21, and we’re fairly sure he’s planning to outlive us all.

2007 was a very good year for us at Acronym; we were joined by some great new guest bloggers, we hosted some highly successful liveblogging from ASAE & The Center events, and we couldn't have been more pleased with the response to our social media month event in November. But we want 2008 to be even better.

To that end, we'd like to ask for the most important feedback of all: yours. For those of you who visit Acronym, whether regularly or not, we'd be very interested in your thoughts about the blog:

- What should we be covering that we're not talking about now?

- What should we do more of?

- What should we do less of?

- Who would you recommend as a potential guest blogger?

Of course, we can't guarantee that a particular guest blogger will say yes, but any and all feedback will be a huge help to us. Leave a comment; let us know what you think. Thank you so much!

I'd like to welcome Acronym's first new guest blogger of 2008: Kevin Mead, CAE, president, North American region and executive director, worldwide operations, for IGAF Worldwide.

Kevin joined IGAF Worldwide as president in 2002. Previously, he has served in positions related to membership and customer relationship management, conferences, field services, certification development, internal audit, and finance, so clearly he approaches his work from a broad base of experience and knowledge.

Kevin is also a savvy world traveler (this recent article of his from ASAE & The Center's GlobalLink e-newsletter is a great example). We're glad to have another blogger with a good sense of the international association picture.

Welcome, Kevin! We're pleased that you'll be a part of the Acronym conversation.

Welcome back, Acronym readers! We hope you all enjoyed your New Year celebrations, and we appreciate your patience while Scott and I took a holiday break from blogging. We're back, and we hope to start the year off right with some new guest bloggers (soon to be introduced), more great posts from the bloggers you already know, and new ideas.

We also wanted to take this opportunity to thank Ben Martin of the Certified Association Executive blog for choosing Acronym as his best blog about associations for 2007. We're honored, and we greatly appreciate Ben's kind words about Acronym. Congratulations as well to the other blogs and bloggers that Ben selected as the best of the year--as his list shows, there was a ton of great stuff going on this year around the association blog community. We're looking forward to the conversation in 2008.

Thank you for tuning into Acronym this year. This is the last day ASAE & The Center will be open this year, so Lisa and I are going to take it easy and stay away from the blog for a week or so. Our guest bloggers were told that we'd be unofficially shutting the blog down until next year, but I suppose if something really strikes their fancy nothing is stopping them from posting anyway.

So, again, thanks for reading, commenting, and making Acronym a successful place for dialog on associating today. Check back on the second of January... until then, Happy Holidays!

In honor of social media month, the kind folks in ASAE & The Center’s Knowledge Initiatives department have added a very cool widget to Acronym. If you look down at the bottom of this post, you’ll see a little icon that says “Bookmark.” To many of you, its meaning will be immediately clear, but for folks who may not have used a similar widget before, I wanted to provide a little extra information.

This icon is intended to facilitate the sharing of Acronym posts through social bookmarking and rating sites—communities where members share links to online articles, blogs, websites, photos, or other materials that they find to be useful or interesting. (Wikipedia has a more detailed explanation, if you're interested in more information.) If you hold your mouse over the icon below or click on it, you’ll see a list of options for sharing and recommending an Acronym post through services such as del.icio.us (a social bookmarking site), Digg (a content sharing and rating site), StumbleUpon (similar to Digg, a site where members share good websites they’ve “stumbled upon,”), and more. You can also use this widget to add posts to your Facebook profile, your Twitter page, or even your personal browser bookmarks.

(On a side note, I had no idea how many different social bookmarking options there were. Our widget has 35 of them listed!)

ASAE & The Center has also added this widget to the models and samples pages on our website, so you can share and recommend content there as well. If you see a post you find particularly valuable, we hope you will share it with others through this new widget. And if you have any questions at all about how the widget works, feel free to drop a comment or e-mail us.

The association/nonprofit blog community has been posting some great stuff lately—perhaps summer is recharging our batteries! I thought I’d pass along a few links to posts I found particularly interesting.

• Jamie Notter argues for the importance of healthy conflict on a senior staff team and, as a bonus, gives five tips on how to handle it productively.
• Ben Martin provides some analysis the current status of online social networking and why associations should be getting on board this train now.
• For the membership folks out there, two complimentary posts: Joe Grant discusses some important steps to take to determine if you’re solving your members’ problems, and Tony Rossell provides a helpful template for a dashboard to capture key information about your membership program.
• On the Bamboo Project blog, Michele Martin has some great ideas on how to build a better conference.

What good stuff have you been reading lately? Feel free to add your two cents in comments!

It gives me great pleasure to announce the first three new Annual Meeting bloggers who will be posting in the coming weeks, as well as during the meeting in Chicago in August. In alphabetical order, they are:

Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association

Hilary Marsh, managing director, REALTOR.org, National Association of Realtors

Matt White, director of marketing, Illinois Park and Recreation Association

I'll give each of our new bloggers the chance to offer their own unique intros. In the meantime, I want to express just how excited we are about these outstanding additions to the crew of Chicago Bloggers. And they won't be the last association community contributors to join the effort, so please keep reading!

It’s my pleasure to introduce a new guest blogger here at Acronym. Virgil Carter is the executive director of ASME in New York City. Founded in 1880 as the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, ASME is a 120,000-member professional organization with a focus on the technical, educational, and research issues of the engineering and technology community.

Virgil comes to Acronym with a great depth of experience as an association leader. He is a past chair of ASAE & The Center’s Executive Management Section Council and served as a member of the Environmental Scan Task Force, among numerous other professional accomplishments.

I’m looking forward to the thoughts he has to share with us about leadership, management, and life as an association executive. Welcome, Virgil!

Please extend a warm welcome to our newest guest blogger, Betsy Boyd-Flynn. Betsy is a senior specialist in communications and marketing with the American College of Rheumatology and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Association Leadership. I've personally gotten a lot out of her contributions to ASAE & The Center over the years, and I'm looking forward to hearing what she has to say on Acronym.

Thanks for joining us, Betsy!

I was reading an article this morning from The Daily Dog about breaking into blogs. They asked Burt Helm of BusinessWeek's Brand New Day blog for tips on how public relations professionals can "break into" the blog world. As is so often the case with me, the thing I took away from the story didn't have anything to do with the topic.

In the article, Helm recommends using Technorati to find blogs pertinent to your industry or business focus, but he adds, "I find better blogs and ones that I really like through word-of-mouth and talking to sources. I always ask important executives what they read online."

I have never asked an important executive what blogs they read. Maybe because I'm in Mississippi and worry that I would get a blank look and have to explain what the big deal about blogs is for 15 minutes. But I'm asking you today. (And if you are an important executive, please let me know so I can say in the future that I have in fact asked important executives what blogs they read.) You obviously read this blog periodically if you are reading this, but what other blogs do you read regularly - and why?

Here are a few I enjoy that are not specifically association-related:
- TP! Wire Service - It's just a collection of interesting stories, but what a collection!
- Fast Company Now - Brief entries with just enough meat to make you feel like you're learning something new but not so much that you think there's no way you can chew it all.
- Creating Passionate Users - Always makes me think
- mental floss blog - I love the blog as much as I do the magazine.
- 800.CEO.READ blog - I don't seem to have as much time as I like to read business books lately, so at times I live vicariously and just read about business books. ;)
- rexblog - A blog by Rex Hammock, the owner of Hammock Publishing. He has become a blog friend along the way, but many years ago, he was just writing an industry blog I read about magazine publishing (and other interesting stuff, too, which is honestly probably why I kept reading).

For the most part, you're the only ones who used the trackback feature, and then it has only been about once every six weeks. Because we were getting (and this is no exaggeration) about 1 trackback spam every 3 minutes (or about 500 a day) we turned the feature off. The spam filters were catching all of them, but unfortunately were catching yours, too, so we had to painfully go in and review the spam and delete a couple times a day. So no more trackbacks, sorry. Feel free to drop a comment that says "I commented on this post in my blog."

By the way, most readers might be asking, what's the association blogoclump? I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong, but I think David Gammel coined that term, or at least used it to describe this collection of bloggers.

I'm thrilled to introduce another guest blogger: Michael Gallery, Ph.D., CAE. Mick is founder and president of Opis Consulting in Highland Village, Texas, which was preceded by a long and distinguished career as an association executive, including 14 years as COO of the American College of Emergency Physicians.

He's also had a long and distinguished volunteer career with ASAE & The Center and is currently a member of The Center for Association Leadership Board of Directors. Notably, he was the chair of the Measures of Success project, which resulted in the ASAE bestseller 7 Measures of Success: What Remarkable Associations Do That Others Don't and he has previously served as the chair of the CAE Commission. He became an ASAE Fellow in 1989.

Please welcome Mick. His first post has been ready to go for a little while, so it will be coming shortly.

Please welcome another new, guest blogger: Ann Oliveri, CAE, senior vice president for strategic development for The Urban Land Institute. Like Peter, our other new blogger, she also has been involved with ASAE & The Center in many ways, including as a charter member of the Marketing Section Council in the mid 1990s. She currently serves on the Journal of Association Leadership Editorial Advisory Board. She was also named an ASAE & The Center Fellow in 2006 and is the author of the blog The Zen of Associations.

Ann is also one of those unique people, very creative and curious. She's a joy to talk to, and I highly recommend searching for her last name on ASAE & The Center's website and reading some of her writings. And check back here.

It is my pleasure to introduce our newest guest blogger, Peter O'Neil, CAE. Peter is assistant executive director with the American Industrial Hygiene Society based in Fairfax, Virginia. He will be well known to many association people as he has served ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership in a variety of ways over the years. He currently serves on The Center for Association Leadership Board of Directors. He was also named an ASAE & The Center Fellow earlier this year.

I've only just started to get to know Peter over the last three years or so and just based on the conversations we've had, I can't wait to see his contributions to this blog. His first post should be coming soon.

It was looking like spam was going to win the battle, but, risking the ire of the nuisance gods, it appears that we've come out on top. At least for now. For those of you with blogs or considering them, I asked John Stone from our service provider to explain what we've done to combat the comment spam:

"Over the last few months, the delivery of spam and junk posts through Web based forms has risen significantly. Comment forms like those at the bottom of ASAE's blog site can easily receive hundreds of junk posts a day. While it may be simple to delete each post, it's a time-consuming process and ultimately degrades the quality and value of the site.

To reduce automated posts, many sites have turned to reverse Turing tests, more commonly known as CAPTCHA. CAPTCHA is simply an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” and is trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University.

A CAPTCHA reduces automated posts by asking a question that only a human would be able to answer. The most popular test challenges a user to enter obscured text embedded within an image. You'll notice these graphics on many reservation system sites, online stores, and at the bottom of ASAE's own comment form.

While it is relatively easy for a person with good eyesight to see and enter 9059, an automated computer program or “bot”, is essentially blind to anything but the publicly available HTML source. A good CAPTCHA program, will insure that there is no textual reference to the image's content, making it easy for us to identify the real posts.

While CAPTCHA does a great job blocking automated computer software, it isn't perfect. Common problems with a visual CAPTCHA are that it can make it very difficult for those with visual disabilities to participate and it's only a matter of time before automated software includes optical character recognition that does it's best to decipher your obscured image.

Deciding whether your site should use a CAPTCHA is probably more difficult than actually implementing one. Many Web based applications already include plug-ins that simply need to be enabled; many others will make such tests standard features in their next releases. For custom sites, CAPTCHA is still an option and can be installed within a few hours once a few key elements are configured.

One of our Acronym bloggers was featured in a Sept. 27 New York Times article about employee blogging by Matt Villand, "Blogging The Hand That Feeds You."

No, it wasn't me.

Here's the quote:

C. David Gammel, the president of High Context Consulting, a Web strategy consulting firm in Silver Spring, Md., said that employee blogs were worth encouraging, as long as companies devised individual policies about blogging and incorporated them into the employee handbook.

“Human resources departments should simply add blogging to the list of activities in which employees should be careful about how they represent the company,” he said.

And is it just me or does every article about employee blogging remind you also of those scare-tactic-laced after-school movies from the 70s? "One night, Linda was staring listlessly at the computer. She couldn't sleep. She had been thinking about it for some time, but she finally did it. She started a blog. She thought know one would know. It would just be her little secret. BUT SHE WAS WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! DON'T DO IT, LINDA. YOUR LIFE WILL NEVER BE THE SAME. GO BACK! YOU WILL BE FIRED! FIRED, I TELL YOU. REALLY. WE'RE NOT JOKING. STOP. RIGHT. NOW."

The funny part to me is that after they explore the handful of bloggers who did get fired for blogging about work and they have the lawyers chime in and say "Just Say No to Blogs," they generally conclude with "It's really just common sense - don't blog about anything you wouldn't want your boss to read." Which is very true. But in this strange new world of cell phones decked out with digital cameras and video capabilities - where clips can be posted on the Web in a nanosecond, where databases of political contributions can be searched without leaving your desk, where a Google search is the new screening process for dating and employment - I just find it odd that "blog" is the only scary word in the lexicon.

A Google search for "fired for blogging" brought back 73,300 results. A Google search for "promoted for blogging" brought back 147 and "hired for blogging" 324. I'm just saying it works both ways - and it's obvious to me that we need to work harder on uncovering the stories about the positive effects of blogging (for an association, for the individual blogger and for our industry in general).

I, for one, am going to do my part on making those search results equal. If you have had any positive experiences you would like to share about blogging or reading a blog - no matter how small - post a comment here or e-mail me directly at slea@mhanet.org. And I'm not just talking about new jobs and promotions - I'm talking about business contacts, sales and networking (an oft-overlooked aspect of blogging).

After all, I wouldn't even be writing this on the Acronym blog today if I had not begun blogging for the Mississippi Hospital Association two years ago.

A quick FYI—in the constant battle against spam, we've had to ratchet up our comments filter. That means it's possible that your comment will get held in cue. We're checking the cue with regularity and publishing all nonspam, but it may take a few hours before your comment goes live. Apologies for the inconvenience, and we're studying alternatives.

For the geeks out there who care about such things—right now we're getting anywhere from 50 to 200 spam comments a day, about 5 to 10 percent of which are sliming their way through our spam filter.

Now that ASAE & The Center's annual meeting is over and the Boston Blog is winding down, I thought it was about time to get Acronym rolling again.

First of all, if you have not already done so, do check out the Boston Blog. I'm about 75 percent through it, and it really does have some good stuff in there—whether you were at the meeting or not. Because they did such a good job covering the meeting, and because I had my nose buried while developing the Daily Now, I'll only do one post on the meeting—sometime in the next few days.

Right now, however, I want to call attention to "5 to See" over in the right-hand column. Rather than have a very long blog roll, we put up five to check out with the notion to change it every so often. We'll be changing them soon, but before we did, I wanted to point out some of the interesting things on those blogs. So, here's my favorite post from the last week or so for each of the current "5 to See":

TomPeters! -- "It Depends on What the Meaning of 'Is' Is." I had to choose this one because it's probably my favorite line from the Clintonian era. It also encapsulates quintessential Peters to me: do something to shake it up.

The Long Tail -- "Peter Moore on Long Tail Gaming." Ostensibly it's about gaming. Take the seven points out of the gaming context, however, and you'll see some pretty powerful stuff.

Brand Autopsy -- "Businesses Gotta Be Confident." Brand Autopsy is a target-rich environment for a posting such as this. I chose this one, I think, because of an article that will appear in the October issue of Associations Now on associations facing attacks from techno-enabled malcontents.

Jeffrey Cufaude, Idea Archtects -- "Kids Nowadays." These lists are always entertaining but, more importantly, drive home generational differences.

Loose Wire -- "An End to the Anonymity of Trash?" Yes, Big Brother's muscles are growing quite strong.

If you've scrolled down and looked at the right-hand column, you've seen a "5 to See" header. These are five blogs that we like. Rather than list 30 or 40 or 50 blogs in a long blogroll, we've decided to spotlight five at a time so if you're inclined you can easily check them out and see if they're something you might be interested in bookmarking.

We'll change the five up from time to time, each time providing a short post about the blogs on the list -- you can always see previous lists by selecting the "Five to See" category. So, the initial 5 to see:

TomPeters! -- The blog to "Reimagine" your own "Search of Excellence." The Master and his blog staff offer their thoughts that challenge convention and goad readers to action. Bonus: Peters puts up slides from all or most of his presentations.

The Long Tail -- Wired editor Chris Anderson's blog on the book on the article that crystalizes one of the major -- if not THE major -- way the Web has changed business and knowledge.

Jeffrey Cufaude, Idea Architects -- Known to many in the association community, Cufaude offers a unique approach and outlook on how to be extraordinary.

Brand Autopsy -- One of the first blogs I started following, John Moore of Starbucks and Whole Foods branding fame, talks about real marketing and what branding really is.

Loose Wire -- To mix it up, Wall Street Journal technology columnist Jeremy Wagstaff has been blogging for a long time. Seems most posts of some insightful look at a tech issue -- and his sidebar resources are priceless.

ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership got its start in the blogging universe by blogging at its annual meeting—and now the 2006 version for the meeting in Boston in August is up and running. Be sure to check it out often.

And if you just can't get enough blogging, see the blog from last year's annual meeting at Opryland in Nashville.

And finally, for those of you who are really hard up, check out the 2004 blog from Minneapolis—but be kind, after all, who had even heard of a conference blog in 2004?

We are lucky to have an experienced set of guest bloggers joining us as we kick off this new endeavor. Our first guest bloggers include:
• Greg Balestrero, CEO of Project Management Institute, a Center board member and former chair of GWSAE and CESSE;
• David Gammel, CAE, president of High Context Consulting, and author of the High Context blog;
• Shawn Lea, vice president for strategic communications for the Mississippi Hospital Association, and author of the The Big Picture blog;
• And Ben Martin, member relations director, Virginia Society of CPAs, and author of the Certified Association Executive blog (which, by the way, is about a lot more than the CAE).

Welcome to Acronym, ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership’s new blog for and about the association community. Here you’ll find a variety of voices, many (but not all) of them from younger association leaders, grappling with ideas and asking questions that affect our profession and the world.

We’re joining the small but growing chorus of blogs serving the association community. We are certainly indebted to trailblazers like the Association Forum’s “From the Corner Office,” along with a number that have sprung up from members of our community with no organizational support. We hope to deliver a blog filled with provocative and pragmatic ideas that will make a difference in the way you think about the work you do.

Here’s what you can expect:

• Our bloggers will question the conventional wisdom of association management, spotlight innovation and excellence both inside and outside the association world, and explore new possibilities for the future of associations.

• Acronym is not a blog about ASAE & The Center. While it may occasionally creep in, we don’t intend for this to be a forum to talk about our organizations and activities or a place to market our offerings or a way to evaluate how well we are doing.

• Scott Briscoe, editor-in-chief of Associations Now, and I will serve as your hosts and regular bloggers in this space. Feel free to let us know how we are doing.

• Several guest bloggers will join us. We intend to ask a variety of people with different perspectives to join us, mostly from the profession but occasionally from outside the profession. The guest blogger list will change every few months. If you’re interested in becoming a guest blogger, let us know.

• Blogs are an editorial format. Each post represents the perspective and viewpoint of the blogger, not of ASAE & The Center. This is true for Scott B. and me as well. We certainly expect to disagree with each other occasionally and if we do our job, you may love some posts, hate others, and see still others as a starting point that you would like to build on.

• And we invite you to build on it. In my mind, the best blogs are conversations. We invite you to agree, disagree, augment or refine anything you see on this blog using the comment function.

So there you have it. We will try to post something every day or every few days at least. We hope you will come back frequently, and, again, let us know how we are doing.