Published by Melissa Madigan, Marketing Coordinator
Whether you’re interested in politics or not, this story deserves your attention.
The iCitizen National Launch Celebration takes place today in Washington D.C. What is iCitizen, you ask? iCitizen is a new app for iPhone (and Android coming soon) that encourages you to make your voice count.
It provides a robust civic engagement platform that allows users to easily track issues of personal importance, learn more about and follow their representatives, and voice
their opinions –all in one place and in the palm of their hand.
–Socialfish.org
It’s a pretty smart move for the political realm to capture the “voice of the people” by creating a space, a mobile soapbox if you will, where citizens can feel like their voice is making a difference. What’s done with the data, and the influence it has on the decision-makers, we’ll have to wait and see.
What about your association? Do you provide a soapbox for your community of members? If so, what does it look like? Is it available to them online, on mobile devices, through social media? Are your members aware of it and using it in a positive way? We’d love to hear about it!
Creating a platform for your members to voice their concerns, opinions and ideas should be on every association’s to-do list. To make informed decisions, with your members’ best-interests in mind, your association needs to make sure there’s ongoing dialogue with members.
Once you’ve established the appropriate platform(s), use the space to interact with your members. Like the iCitizen app, maybe taking occasional polls to see what’s relevant and of interest to your community is something to try. Or making sure your own representatives are actively engaging and offering quick ways to connect, like iCitizen offering the Twitter handles of their listed reps.
If your association needs a little guidance on how to make a platform like this possible, check out our Association Anywhere AMS. It provides a highly effective –and user friendly –platform for engaging members via Community Anywhere, a private online community solution, which is also mobile-ready to reach members on any device.
Photo by flickr/John McCarthy
