The time of year we reflect back on what we should be thankful for. Putting on your professional hat for just a moment … what do you have to be thankful? Your staff & colleagues? Your members? Your volunteers? Your component organizations?

It really takes all to create a vibrant association.

Community organizer. That's the top pick of three new jobs Seth Godin suggests you might want to consider adding to your staff. Interesting choice and strikingly similar to the component relations professional position that is frequent in many associations. His definition:

COMMUNITY ORGANIZER. Find and connect and lead a tribe of dedicated users that contribute to and benefit from the work you do.

What other positions in association fit this profile? And are we really valuing and supporting these key positions?

CTAM To Honor Local Chapters With Chairman's Award – this seemingly mild twitter from Shelly Good-Cook, Sr. Dir. Membership Marketing & Chapter Relations for CTAM: Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing is anything but.

Understand that an online community is not a substitution for face2face and it won’t solve dysfunctional chapters. These were two messages from today’s ASAE Component Relations Section Council Virtual Lunch on Online Communities. The call featured four veteran online community developers: Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer (both of SocialFish and the online community Yapstar, Cynthia D’Amour from the Chapter Leaders Playground, and Lynn Morgan from Social Networking for Association Professionals (SNAP) online community.

There are many lessons from our elections and one may well be classified as a great aha for national associations and their geographic components.

CTAM shows the power of Facebook for driving a chapter's event to new levels ... shared from ASAE's Listserv!

"Build social media into the fabric of what you do..."

A must read posting (and article in October issue of Associations Now) on the future and associations is over at Acronym. Lisa Junker conducted the interview that is the basis for both with futurist Rohit Talwar, CEO of Fast Future Research and a key player in ASAE's future research. Here's perhaps one of the most important points highlighted in the posting...

Announcing a new resource for exploring the chapter of the future ... Over the past couple of years, we've been working with a number of associations on the issue of how to address the struggles of the current chapter. Much of this research, discussion and testing has led us to a couple of observations.