Thursday, August 18, 2011

Fizzle Out or Follow Through?

At the end of a professional development event, you have a choice: Let the program spirit fizzle out, or follow through on all (or at least some) of the commitments you made, stretching the value of the program. I choose the latter! Attending the ASAE conference—as well as the Association Media & Publishing (AM&P) conference a couple of months ago—took time and money. I’m going for a big return on that investment.

Since the conclusion of the AM&P and ASAE annual meetings, I’ve been linking up with new colleagues in the association community, asking for thoughts and providing help with their requests. I’ve also been downloading session handouts, reviewing my notes, reflecting on the ideas I had while chatting with so many interesting people and prioritizing my follow-up steps. I can’t make everything happen all at once, and some ideas will fall off my list, but I am being intentional about getting as much benefit as possible from my educational and networking opportunities. Doing so will promote my main goal of getting a full-time job and will strengthen my performance in that future role.

Top on my follow-through list: Getting back to Kelly Flowers about personal mobile and social coaching. I’ve gained a lot of expertise in social media and collected a lot of information about mobile technologies, and now I want to take that to the next level. AM&P and ASAE have offered many terrific educational programs on these subjects, and I’ve learned a great deal from participation and application. Still, when I bumped into Kelly at the ASAE conference and heard about her new business to help associations maximize their mobile and social investments, I knew I wanted to take advantage of Kelly’s expertise. I asked her about personal coaching, and she has already sent me an outline of options to review.

Check out Kelly’s new business at http://www.growthvine.com. It’s got a lot of sizzle!

4 comments:

- Kevin said...

Good points. After spending lots of time and money to attend an event, it's silly to let it go to waste by not following up to solidify new relationships.

The challenge is finding a way to organize all the business cards and memos-to-self in your smart phone. That's where planning and systematic thinking are very helpful.

I populate my calendar with self-assigned appointments to follow up on my new contacts. Be sure to include the topic you discussed with them...juggling many introductions at a meeting can be confusing, for them and for you. The only thing worse than not following up is following up with the wrong person or for the wrong reason.

Gerry Romano, CAE said...

Kevin -- thanks for your comments -- great ideas and reminders:)-- Gerry

Jeffrey Cufaude said...

Thanks for the reminder to go back and peruse session handouts, downloading those that interest me, and spending some time with the content. It's easy to forget the value of all that archived content.

Great to see you in St. Louis BTW.

Gerry Romano, CAE said...

Jeff -- Great to see you, too! And thanks again for the fabu Ignite presentation. You have been an inspiring speaker/writer since we were little-kid ASAErs, and you just keep getting better. -- Gerry