This week in Association Land – TLDs, Curiosity, and Lessons from Learnapalooza
| Hi there! Thank you again for subscribing to my newsletter. Here are a few stories that Association Chat covered this week that you may have missed and some other things I found of interest for Association Land. Enjoy! Article that got me thinking – Would it matter if your .org was a .com, .net, or something else? This news about Ethos Capital acquiring the Public Interest Registry (the nonprofit that was formed to oversee the .ORG that nonprofits use) hit late in the week and ever since then, it’s had me thinking about the implications for associations. On the surface, this is a story about a change in pricing and Top Level Domain (TLD) ownership. But it calls into question the trust that the public has in nonprofits, how that trust is recognized in visual signals like the .org, and whether nonprofits now need to create a verified TLD to help create more trust. Worth jumping into even if you don’t know what a TLD is right now. What I’m Reading – Curious: The Desire to Learn and Why Your Future Depends On It by Ian Leslie. I had one of the darkest years of my life in 2012 and while coming out of it, I discovered the book How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci by Michael Gelb. The book highlighted one of da Vinci’s key characteristics, curiosity, and provided questions and activities for developing one’s own curiosity. Once I discovered that I had lost my curiosity somewhere along my path in life, I went to work using Gelb’s activities to rebuild it and the results helped me to get through that difficult time and even transform my life. Since that time, I’ve become fascinated with the subject of curiosity and this book by Ian Leslie dives into it in an intriguing way. I’m early into the book (it’s the November book for the Association Chat Book Club, which you can join on Patreon) and looking forward to finishing it this weekend. (Note: Book club members are telling me the audio version of this book isn’t great, so if you want to read it, you might need to buy the hard copy. Or maybe you should just order Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers on Audible, which is INCREDIBLE in audio format.) Something new I’m trying – Lessons by text. I am an online learning junkie. For years I have not only devoured online courses through Coursera, Udemy, Masterclass, CreativeLive, and more; but I’ve also been a paid mentor and content creator for a variety of online course platforms. On November 4th I presented on “Using Snack Sized Continuing Education Offerings to Increase Engagement and Enrollment” at Mini-Learnapalooza and in preparation for that session, I signed up for an online mini-course conducted completely by text to my phone. Arist delivers courses in short lessons by text daily. I was skeptical at the beginning, but I enjoyed my short trial. Was it perfect? No. I didn’t receive feedback to know that I was on the right track and there was no report kicked out showing me my progress or providing me the encouragement to continue. But the lessons themselves were enjoyable and easy to work into my day. Something to consider for associations wanting to try something new that is an easy way to create a habit for their members. Fascinating person I’m Interviewing – Speaking of habits, this week I sat down with the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable, Nir Eyal, for an Association Chat special event. (Sidenote: I just found out Nir is paid ~$48k per keynote, so I feel especially thankful he made time to sit with me and the Association Chat audience.) I asked Nir how associations could make their associations habit-forming and he answered. His answer (and thinking of membership as a habit in itself) has me reframing the way I think about the membership experience and how we can better market to association members. Thoughtcast Media captured the interview and a segment of the interview will be available on the podcast. If you listen to that and decide you want more, the entire interview will be released in a couple of weeks to Patreon patrons. New person on social media I’m following – @AuSAE on Instagram. This is the Instagram account for CEO of the Australian Society of Association Executives and I’ve been enjoying seeing what our association friends in the Australia and New Zealand region have been doing. This is an extremely active Society that offers a lot of great learning and has a large group of committed members. I’m enjoying learning more about the CEO and AuSAE! Thanks again for subscribing and have a wonderful weekend. All the best, KiKi *I’m testing out a new simpler format for my newsletters based on Tim Ferriss’ 5-Bullet Fridays for weekly updates to the mailing list from Association Chat. Please let me know if you like this on Twitter @kikilitalien using the super unique hashtag #assnchat. |
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