Associations are about expectations—on both sides of the coin.

Members have expectations of the associations they join. And associations have ideas about actions they want their members to take. However, members generally have the control in this equation: If members don’t want to do something, they won’t.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Christina Green of MemberClicks blog advocates implementing member rewards as a way to encourage certain behaviors.

“Follow the give-and-get method,” Green writes. “If you give members something they want, you’ll get what you want.”

The idea is to maintain both membership and participation while pushing the association’s mission.

Some reward strategies Green suggests: incentivizing social media participation, giving discounts to those who sign up early for events, and providing giveaways to members who send in their dues before the deadline.

“While asking is important and generally effective, providing people a reason to do something is even more so,” Green explains.

Workflow Wonders

Any process you think about in a business ought to be able to be automated and repetitive http://t.co/HmMfRUbtH3

— CMSWire.com (@cmswire) December 8, 2014

In today’s rapid-paced world things are changing constantly, and within organizations that means the workflow systems we rely on now may not meet our increasingly evolving needs.

“It’s new devices, new technologies, and a lot of them require instant responses,” Nintex CEO John Burton says in an interview with CMSWire discussing current trends in corporate workflows.

Among other things, he emphasizes the “significant evolution” in mobile, social media, and data collection. Burton stresses that many of the tools that organizations use currently rely on unstructured data; for many organizations the next step is to figure out how to automate the processes that rely on those tools. (ht @cmswire)

Other Links of Note

Don’t let poor wording hurt your emails. “Overall, the word choices you make add up to the tone of your communications,” author Bernard Marr explains in a LinkedIn blog post. He suggests focusing on the positive, being specific, and avoiding the word “don’t” (instead, write what the person can “do”).

Insecurity can be a good thing. Society often looks at this personality trait as a negative one. But Sarah Jones, founder of Introverted Alpha, suggests that it can be viewed as a solid “call to action.”

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