Published by Melissa Madigan, Marketing Coordinator, ACGI Software
For yesterday’s Thank You Thursday, I wanted to share my personal thanks for a few coworkers at ACGI!
I’m still fairly new to the team (joined mid-April), so when I was invited to have lunch with them, you can imagine my excitement on being included! Maintaining communication (and friendly lunchtime gatherings) is an important part of building relationships at work.
Communication and collaboration encourage a positive work environment, not only for our work space, but for any association and its members. What I see changing are the platforms on which we interact. I thought I’d define the more popular ones that your association may or may not be using to communicate with members, and how you can benefit from using them.
Forums/Comments: Online forums allow members to hold conversations by posting messages which form a “thread.” These messages or comments will usually address a topic (for example the main idea in an article or blog post). The forum framework is about give and take. Discussions run their course organically, with members posing and responding to each other’s questions, opinions, suggestions and comments.
Blogs: Bloggers generally instill their own personality into whatever topic they’ve chosen to write about. The same is true for corporate blogs. So, a blog written by a member of your association’s executive team or staff should represent your organization’s brand and the writer’s personality as well. Some tips for making your association’s blog a success:
With a blog, your association can connect with members on a more personal level, providing a potentially effective channel for delivering calls to action that members will retain.
Wikis: A wiki is a collaboration platform that allows members to share, upload, edit, and remove content, and collaborate on specific projects defined by your association. Basically, it’s a means to capture knowledge and bring organization to it. ACGI provides our customers with their own wiki through Association Anywhere, to capture best practices related to their own industry. They can prove very useful for simplifying often tedious tasks. One example is planning events, especially in the early phases when defining themes, session topics and other program elements requiring input from members who may be geographically distributed.
Chat: This type of communication has many faces. Chat is often real-time communication, very conversational, and composed of quick responses. Examples are tweet chats (Twitter), g-chats (Google) and instant messaging (AIM). Chats allow for time-sensitive information to be shared among members, whether it’s solving a quick technical problem or offering quick tips for using a new feature.
Creating an open environment for communication is the end goal. Is your association presently using any of these platforms to encourage widespread participation and collaboration? What are you planning? What are your challenges? Share it with us on Facebook or Twitter using the hashtags #TYThursday and/or #TYT.
