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A membership site is not a money-machine. The clue is in the name: membership site. It is a collection of people. You don’t just set it up, take people’s money, give them some content and walk away. They are there for an experience. They want something, and you have a duty of care to give it to them. Back when I first set up my Spirit Authors site, I attended a training session with the developers of WishList Member. The one thing they said repeatedly to our group was: ‘People COME to your site for the content, but they STAY for the community.’

The bottom line is this: a membership site is not a product; it’s a business. As such, it doesn’t just need good content; it needs a business model, a marketing plan and a team of people who know what they need to do and how to do it.

mix of iPads and tablets with detachable keyboards.

HP EliteBook Revolve 810 G3, a laptop-tablet hybrid

Some K-12 systems are moving away from iPads and on to Chromebooks. And many elementary schools use Kindles and tablets made by Samsung and Android rather than Apple iPads.

“We talk to community managers all the time and we ask ‘What’s the thing you didn’t think was going to be part of your role? What’s the one component you were surprised how much time you were spending on it?’ It’s almost always evangelism and coaching,” said Jim Storer, principal and cofounder of The Community Roundtable, during a webinar earlier this month cohosted with community platform provider Higher Logic. Storer’s colleague and TheCR cofounder Rachel Happe added that the organization created a working group on the role of “becoming an internal consultant,” just to help TheCR members excel in that role.

TheCR report also notes that “best-in-class” online communities are more often managed by a staff team, rather than by a single person.

“Given what we now know about the complexity of—and potential for—sustained and productive engagement, the notion that a lone community manager can address all the strategic, operational, and tactical responsibilities is quickly fading,” the report states. “Implementing many of the processes and programs that are markers of maturity generally requires more resources, and best-in-class communities with bigger teams are able to prioritize community programming, advocacy programs, community management training, and other key community elements.”

Also swelling is the number of adjuncts. They now make up 50 to 75 percent of those teaching in higher education. Why colleges rely so much on adjuncts has been discussed thoughtfully and at length elsewhere; chief among the reasons are that they are not as expensive as tenure-track professors, their scheduling can more easily align with the needs of the college, and firing them is not fraught with the same peril as firing full-time faculty members. It should hardly come as a surprise that all of the factors that make adjuncts attractive to administrators make them equally attractive to union organizers. For example, at Washington University in St. Louis, where adjuncts voted 138 to 111 in favor of organizing, the core issues were low wages, lack of benefits, and lack of job security.

It turns out conflict isn’t always bad. In fact, psychologically it can be extremely positive, especially in a team environment.

1. Inspiring adaptability.

4. Improving productivity.

Keeping Your Skill Set Current Can Be Key to Keeping Your Job Small and midsize companies can’t afford to not keep up with technology, and neither can enterprise-level companies. This past fall, IBM notified employees, who it had determined needed additional training, they were required to step up their technological game, and that they would receive only 90% of their salary while embarking upon this additional training. Talk about an incentive to stay on top of changes in technology ! According to the article in the New York Times covering this move, some IBM workers received an email letting them know that an assessment had determined certain members of the team had “not kept pace with acquiring the skills and expertise needed to address changing client needs, technology and market requirements.” While some criticized the move, the reality is that employees can no longer be complacent when it comes to their grasp of technology and how to use it to help their businesses grow. That’s something to keep in mind, for sure, whether you’re just embarking on a career or whether you’re already in the workforce and want to make sure you have the skills you need to stay marketable.

The Modern Worker Needs to Be Constantly Learning

Well, when it comes to the things that you are passionate about, there’s a community for that! Whatever it is that you are interested in, I can guarantee you that there’s an online community out there filled with like-minded folks just waiting to meet you.

The key to feeling the love is all about actually engaging with your tribe! Being an active member is what will make it feel like a community to you.

too many nonprofit CEOs and their boards continue to miss the answer to succession planning sitting right under their noses—the homegrown leader.

leadership development deficit.

The sector’s C-suite leaders, frustrated at the lack of opportunities and mentoring, are not staying around long enough to move up. Even CEOs are exiting because their boards aren’t supporting them and helping them to grow.

According to a study from the Girl Scout Research Institute, 73 percent of girls are interested in STEM-related fields, but girls are more likely to “drop out” of STEM fields once they get to college. It also found that about half of all girls don’t think STEM is a typical career path for women, and 57 percent agreed if they went into a STEM career, “they’d have to work harder than a man just to be taken seriously.”

In 2014, GSUSA revolutionized its cookie program when it introduced Digital Cookie, which allowed Girl Scouts to sell cookies online via a personalized website or in-person using a mobile app..

Girl Scouts teaches the five essential skills of goal setting, decision making, money management, people skills, and business ethics,” Chávez said. “It’s all part of Girl Scouts’ legacy of teaching cutting-edge skills relevant to today’s girls, while staying true to the core values of our mission. Digital Cookie 2.0 is allowing us to do this on a whole new level, which will help girls in school, in their careers, and in life.”

flexibility means people will need better and perhaps unconvenational ways to communicate to help them establish goals and feel engaged at work.

What’s your value proposition to a member or customer, particularly a younger one, who may be engaged in your association’s industry during only half the workday, or a fifth of it?

In 2016, 31 percent of remote workers were doing so 80 percent of the time.

“online communities” – the thousands of discussion forums allowing like-minded people to find one another, keep in touch, and share information. Most often these online communities are started by one or two highly motivated and unpaid individuals (aided by the amazing availability of free platforms to host such groups), and participation by all subscribers is intentional and voluntary. They operate on the principle of exchange, since if everyone lurks and never posts, no helpful ideas can emerge.

I asked them about how they worked with online volunteers and at first they said they didn’t have any.  Naturally, I soon changed their perception. In fact, NTEN depends on the freely donated time and skills of its involved members.

Why is it important to recognize this quasi-invisible workforce? Because seeing and valuing the volunteer nature of this service will let you appreciate and strengthen it. Further, it’s possible to apply the principles of volunteer management to make such volunteer participation easier and more productive. For example: