Ernie Smith shared four lessons he sees in his Association’s Now post on craft breweries and chapters. What Ernie is doing is underscoring two salient points: (1) the traditional model for chapters needs refreshing and (2) we need only look beyond associations to find lots of examples and models to guide us doing just that. Other places to peer at are Meetup.com which taps the power of technology to take the angst out of keeping a community connected and BisNow whose secret sauce offers its four lessons (locally sourced, off-line fanatics, keep it snappy and humanizing).
As we look at any of these examples, the two key points that keep standing out are (1) we have to offer an experience and (2) we must reduce the hurdles required to create those experiences, e.g. user-friendly. Do your chapters deliver?