Membership

Tuesday Buzz: An Association for Snowball Fights

When many of DC's associations shut down due to inclement weather, here's one that ramps up its, uh, outreach efforts. Also: some new conference engagement lingo worth learning.

Washington, DC, is known for its associations for just about everything. But here’s one even association experts may not have heard of.

For one thing, it only really kicks into action when it snows.

The Washington DC Snowball Fight Association, which is exactly what it sounds like, just got its latest fight on this morning. The group, which launched during the 2010 “Snowmageddon” snowstorm that covered the region, organizes public snowball fights when the right amount of the white stuff is covering the ground.

On Tuesday morning, that meant Meridian Hill Park was the place to be. The park in the Columbia Heights neighborhood hosted the latest snowball fight, and it was a pretty amazing event to behold:

Somewhat fittingly, an account of the association’s first big “conference” at Dupont Circle during Snowmageddon 2010 reads like a war story.

“Just before the fight was due [to] start at 2 p.m. on the Saturday, an unbelievable 5,500 people had joined the group, and, with the blow of a horn, snowballs filled the air and flew in all directions,” according to a member’s post recounting the event on the association’s Facebook page. “Seemingly instinctively, the die-hard fighters massed inside the fountain, and appeared to be defending it from the huge, encircling throng, which made repeated attempts (in vain!) to charge the marble statue.”

Some would say there’s no better way to spend a snow day.

New Conference Vocab

Conferences That Work scribe Adrian Segar admits he invented a few of the terms in his glossary on conference engagement.

But with his book The Power of Participation on the way, he wanted to share some of his new conference participation terms. Before the book comes out, you can get an understanding of “Pair Share” and “State-change Human Spectrograms” before the rest of the world does. There’s a chance those terms might mean a lot to your session planning down the line. (ht @ASegar)

Other Links of Note

Writing a good email subject line is challenging, but SocialFish guest blogger Steve Aedy offers eight tips on how to succeed.

“The most successful conference organizers intentionally design learning opportunities that directly link to their target market’s business performance.” Velvet Chainsaw Consulting’s Jeff Hurt highlights the results of a new study.

Hunting for a new AMS? MemberClicks has some tips for selecting vendors.

(iStock/Thinkstock)

Ernie Smith

By Ernie Smith

Ernie Smith is a former senior editor for Associations Now. MORE

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