Lunchtime Link Roundup: Engagement Points to Consider

Working with your members, your audience, or the people around you can prove to be a major challenge if you don’t know how to engage them properly. Some thoughts on the matter from the blogosphere:

• Don’t be boring: Jeff Hurt of Velvet Chainsaw Consulting has a warning for those leading boring conferences with limited usefulness — you could be turning your attendees into zombies  (opens in a new tab). “Countless conference hours are wasted due to boring, ineffective presentations,” he writes. “Attendees will only put up with so much boring information before they are ready to revolt.”
• Step away from the slideshow templates: Amber Naslund of Brass Tack Thinking and SideraWorks thinks event organizers should stop requiring speakers to use specific slideshow templates  (opens in a new tab) in their presentations — something she says leads to mediocre engagement. “You aren’t going to weed out bad design, weak content, or sales-heavy presentations with a slide template,” she claims. “Those are human problems that are driven by the speaker, not problems with the tools or the delivery mechanisms.”
• Don’t rest on your laurels: Anna Caraveli, founder of Connection Strategists, warns of associations that look back at their greatest successes a little too fondly: “They cling to inflexible, top-down governance and staff models that make it impossible for the association to understand, track or respond quickly to changing member needs or adjust course to pursue developing opportunities.” Her blog post contains a picture of a dodo  (opens in a new tab). You don’t get any more direct than that.
• Hop on Facebook: Frank J. Kenny, faculty member at the U.S. Chamber Institute for Organization Management, did a must-watch video interview with the Pendleton, Oregon Chamber of Commerce’s Lisa Farquharson on her organization’s success story  (opens in a new tab) — the group’s Facebook page managed to get 5,000 likes.
• Temper expectations: Jeffrey Cufaude of Idea Architects calls out those who are too quick to criticize slow responsiveness  (opens in a new tab) or disengagement. He suggests, instead, setting clear expectations. “No universal standard for responsiveness exists. Instead, each of us needs to articulate our normal timeframe,” he writes. “Call my voicemail and you’ll be told that I will respond within 24 hours.”

Are your messages “boring”? If so, what are you trying to do to solve that?