Like so many other professions, association management is positively awash in jargon. For starters, we love our acronyms. Have you earned your CAE? Been to XDP or MMCC? Applied for a DELP scholarship? Read your AN newsletter today? And that’s just here at (ahem) ASAE. You could list a slew from your own organization in five seconds flat, I’m willing to bet.

We also have our specialized terms: our certifications and certificates, our 501(c)(6)s and (3)s, our unrelated business income and Form 990s. We all need to know this language, though depending on your role at your association, you may get by with more or less fluency.

But no matter what your business card says you do at your organization, you had better be able to speak tech. Even if your job doesn’t require you to write code for your association management system or develop the back end of your website, you probably are connected to your office through multiple devices, use project management and collaboration tools to get work done, and have to know an email spoofing scam when you see one.

When you know the language of common tech tools and functions, several good things happen: You understand them more fully, you use them properly, and you communicate about them more clearly—with the IT team and everyone else who uses them.

So if you can’t tell your SaaS from your BYOD, we’ve got you covered with the ultimate glossary of practical tech terms for association non-techies. You may not personally need to implement marketing automation in your office, but one day your marketing director or CEO may ask your opinion about how it could help promote the program you’re responsible for. Even if
you don’t know the answer, you’d best know what they’re talking about. We’ll help you study up.

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