Many small staff associations may be starting to plan their annual meetings or conventions right around now. If that’s the case for you, be sure to think about how to assess your meeting after it’s over. Otherwise, how else will you improve??

So, how do you assess your meeting?

• Staff interviews: Conduct interviews with staff members and the sales team. Through confidential, one-on-one interviews, solicit buy-in for recommendations and identify the most culturally friendly approach to achieving ABC’s goals and objectives. Interview questions will be approved in advance.
• Stakeholder interviews: Conduct interviews with stakeholders to gather information for the components of the evaluation. Interview questions will be approved in advance.
• Member interviews: Conduct interviews with ABC’s largest customers to gather information for the components of the evaluation. Interview questions will be approved in advance.
• E-surveys: Conduct e-surveys of staff members (entire association) for full organizational buy-in, stakeholders and members (those not interviewed) to further validate interview findings and gather enough data to be statistically valid to support
  recommendations for improvement.
• Benchmarking assessment of other associations with like-size and larger event
  departments.
• Sales team effectiveness assessment

Based on interviews, analysis and research, you’ll know how successful your event was and what factors to change while planning the next one.

Has your small staff association begun using social media to support its customer service efforts? Even if you haven’t, check out the below infographic from ZenDesk about how social media has affected customer service.

Interestingly, 34% of survey participants use Facebook to interact with their favorite brands. That’s a significant percentage, and one that should not be ignored.

If your organization uses social media for customer service, share your success stories or issues you’ve faced.

Source

Good morning and happy Friday! Let’s get right to our favorite blog posts of the week; be sure to share your own faves in the comments!

1. Maddie Grant shares findings from a Conversocial study indicating that nearly 50% of consumers would be less likely to buy anything from a company with multiple unanswered questions on their Facebook page. I can speak from experience that although social customer service is annoying and difficult, it can speak positively about your brand in spades.

2. Got an interview via Skype coming up? Don’t miss Cindy Butts’ great tips – the most important one, for me, is to actually know how to use Skype before the interview. I had that issue about a year and a half ago, but luckily, everything worked out – and I got the job.

3. At the Acronym blog, Mark Athitakis references an interesting NYT article and asks: Are we suffering from teamwork fatigue? Lots of research suggests that people are actually more creative on their own due to the “groupthink” mentality. Read the comments on this one too.

4. Jamie Notter wrote a very interesting post about Humanize and millennials this week. As a millennial myself, I found it particularly interesting. Do milliennials bring a fresh perspective to the workplace, or will they (we?) become accustomed to the same practices that generations before us have used?

5. When brainstorming and strategizing, do you truly get down “in the trenches” and nurture your ideas? Jeffrey Cufaude shares a great metaphor – water your ideas like a garden. Just like plants need nurturing, so do your ideas.

From everyone at MemberClicks, have a wonderful weekend!

Good afternoon and happy Thursday! In anticipation of the weekend, we’d like to share a few new presentations and slideshows courtesy of Slideshare. Let us know what you think!

Remember a few months ago when we introduced you to some pretty crazy Facebook changes?

Basically, everyone’s profile is going to look like the one below.

Facebook is getting ready to roll Timeline out to everyone, whether you like it or not. Once you see the “Enable Timeline” button on your Facebook, you’ll have one week to get your profile in order before you have to switch over.

Here’s some more info about Facebook’s new changes:

In addition to Timeline, thanks to Facebook’s Open Graph, a slew of apps – such as Spotify, Foodspotting  and Nike+  – will be integrated into your news feed and timeline.

But what does these and other changes mean for your small staff association and its Facebook page?

For starters, Facebook has eliminated the need for people to “like” your page to interact with it. Now, anyone can like or comment on posts – without liking your page as a whole. This places the emphasis on engagements over likes. Now – hopefully – more people than ever before will be able to interact with your organization’s Facebook page!

Keep in mind, this will challenge your association to produce super interesting content, listen to the conversations happening on your page and not focus on the overall fan growth.

Facebook users will have more control over what appears in their Newsfeeds thanks to an easy-to-find “unsubscribe” button, so it’s time to start thinking about how you can really pump up your content and make it interesting, relevant and engaging to your fanbase.

What do you think of Facebook’s new changes?