Over the past ten years, I’ve worked at three different trade associations and have made friends at many others. After all that time, I feel like I can say this with a certain level of comfort: it’s pretty weird to work in the association industry.
It’s weird because you’re all working to assist a spectrum of different sectors – there’s a trade association for restaurants, banks, broadcasters, realtors, morticians, even deer breeders – but, really, you’re all mostly looking to do the same thing: to share information for the betterment of your industry and society at large.
This is harder to do than it sounds. Human beings are pretty bad at communication. We are often just as bad at wanting to communicate, or knowing what to communicate. In order to amend this, nearly every association I’ve ever known has investigated the possibility of building an online forum or networking group where people can share information, policies, and trends.
Tags: Good Teaching • Web 2.0 Tool