About a year and a half ago, NASPO began the conversation about broadening their mission to include a higher education component. The idea was to partner with a handful of top-tier universities with programs in supply chain management and similar degree programs to create a pipeline of students to become the next generation of state government workers.

A few of the email subject lines in my inbox today:

• Strategic Goal Check In
• Duck noise at Peabody
• Long-Term Investments
• RegOnline Testing
• Membership Committee Meeting
• Sponsor Info
• Resignation
• January Financials
• Scheduling a call

Participant engagement and supporting peer-to-peer connection is critical for any face-to-face conference, but when the primary purpose of an event is to “build relationships” you’d better be sure you provide a program that delivers. Gone are the days during which associations set out a coffee break and assumed that valuable, caffeine and sugar-fueled networking would just happen. For the National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO) and the 2017 Exchange, the planning committee took the themes and principles of engagement to heart.

In this blog post, AMR outlines the strategic planning process his company used to uncover trends that associations need to tackle now.

Recently we published the first of a three-part series on emerging trends within the association community. As previously outlined, AMR’s research was based on the outcomes of several strategic planning sessions conducted by our firm over a twelve-month period. Our sampling included data from facilitated sessions involving a diverse set of clients. Some were self-managed while others were AMC-managed and they represented an array of industries and organizational types including federations, healthcare societies and professional member societies.

If you look at what we do in Creative services daily it must look like a bit like controlled chaos. You could see us working on a pop up banner for a conference in our first few hours of our day, a header for an e-postcard the next, then styling a website layout after that, all the while attending timeline and other important meetings. Let’s just say that it is a good idea to have awesome scheduling and multi-tasking skills if you are on the Creative Services team.