We recently kicked off our Thought Leadership Webinar Series for 2016 with Reggie Henry, CAE, the CIO of ASAE: The Center for Association Leadership. The webinar was entitled Thriving with Disruption: Associations, Technology and Key Trends for 2016. In his presentation, Reggie shared his unique vision on the state of technology and the digital disruption that will continue to impact associations as we move through 2016. He focused on a number of key areas of technology all organizations need to consider in the near term and in the future as they determine the strategies they will want to pursue.
Reggie joined me again for Episode 25 of Ask the Thought Leader, where we focused on key areas he addressed during the webinar as well as his top takeaways from ASAE’s recent Annual Technology Conference. You can view the episode here.
A key portion of Reggie’s presentation focused on every association’s role with mobile technology – specifically the need to be available to your members and prospects whenever and wherever they choose to connect with you, on their device of choice. He further drove those points home during our conversation, in particular how this isn’t a single generational need, but rather a “requirement” all organizations need to get out in front of to remain successful.
To wrap up our conversation, Reggie highlighted two key takeaways from the recent 2015 ASAE Tech Conference. First, he was surprised by the number of non-technology people (around 45%) that were in attendance – especially the number of CEOs that were there. Each year ASAE holds a CIO only summit the day before the conference. This year 15 CEO’s showed up to attend. When asked why they were trying to attend the summit, one CEO said it best. “The amount of change going on in and around technology demands everyone’s attention.” This reinforces Reggie’s long standing belief that every association needs to know and understand their technology capabilities to remain effective in serving their members.
Reggie’s second takeaway centered on location awareness technology and how it will impact association events moving forward. This technology is already providing event planners with invaluable real time information that can be the difference in a meeting being a hit or a miss.
And while I have you here, I want to invite you to attend our next Thought Leadership Webinar for 2016 on February 17, First Look: Looking Forward 2016 – Association Business Environmental Scan, with Dean West, FASAE, President of Association Laboratory. Dean will be debuting his company’s annual benchmarking scan of the association business environment, and will highlight key findings from the study and introduce how they are shaping today’s leadership environment.
