I follow A List Apart somewhat, mostly because I like to follow web happenings and design, not because I know anything about how to do that stuff. Also 37 Signals for the same reason. However, I find lots of things that help me organize my thinking about association management. For example this post talks about usability. Of course this is immediately applicable to web design, like duh. But it also can be applied to dealing with volunteers. Why, you ask? Because website users are volunteers coming to your site. How do you make them happy, and keep them? Do the things this article says. How do we make volunteers happy and keep them? Read the post and think about it.
From what I can tell, the impetus for this book was that the folks who wrote it, Jeff De Cagna , David Gammel , Jamie Notter , Mickie Rops and Amy Smith , were “concerned by the instinctively conservative approach to organizational stewardship that far too many association executives and volunteers continue to pursue in the early years of the 21 st century.” I took notes throughout the book, and now I realize they are far too extensive to make a very good book review. And I am definitely the choir that this book is preaching to. However, I really, really liked the problems these folks addressed and they pretty much slaughtered and butchered several sacred cows. This book is not extensive narrative or heavily footnoted, but it is based on the collective experience of 5 people who together have worked with many different organizations, and the collective themes will be familiar to anyone in the field. On a meta level, this book takes observations of what’s happening in the