Walking the Community Talk
Many associations profess that their focus is on fostering community among their members for the purpose of facilitating knowledge sharing and other professionally enhancing activities. ASAE even came out with a report recommending building community driven membership benefits.
Yet, many of these same associations limit or even discourage their staff from participating in similar activities. Some do not encourage staff to use time in the office to engage in online communities or skimp on professional development. Others specifically block access to “Ëœunauthorized’ web sites and limit the ability to use tools such as instant messaging. How can they reasonably expect their staff to develop effective and powerful community-based experiences for their members when they do not encourage their staff to engage in such activities themselves?
Association executives must encourage their staff and leadership to experiment with and model the behaviors and actions they want to elicit from their membership. Any association that does not do that will ultimately fail in their community efforts because they honestly won’t be able recognize it.
