MSAE is excited to welcome Tobi Lyon, MBA, to our Board of Directors! Take a moment to get to know Tobi and what she brings to our organization. 

These days, risk management is top of mind for association leaders. Last week, I had the opportunity to discuss event risk management with Jeff Tenenbaum. Jeff is one of the nation's leading association attorneys. He (literally) wrote the book on association tax compliance and currently sits on ASAE's Legal Advisory Council. Because Jeff is deeply involved in association issues, he's an excellent resource on some of the more complex and highly specific scenarios that associations are navigating.

Responsibility (and Risk) is Shared 

During our conversation, Jeff made it clear that both associations and venues have a duty of care to host our members safely at face-to-face events in the context of COVID-19. He encourages associations to endeavor to obligate venues to take on significant, specific responsibilities to keep attendees safe - perhaps in the form of an addendum to the original contract that would, ideally, include indemnification of the association. (This may be more than venues are willing to do so we should expect some give and take on this.) Jeff also suggests it's a good idea to check in on your general commercial liability insurance policy to ensure that it contains legal defense coverage. All the better if the venue will also name the association in its general commercial liability policy. 

MSAE's Annual Meeting will be held on August 4, 2020, beginning at 12 PM at the Radisson Plaza Hotel at Kalamazoo Center - I hope you will join us! We have some important items on the agenda including the election of new directors to the board, the ratification of a revised set of bylaws, and an update on the State of the Society.  

MSAE's Board of Directors unanimously supported the slate proposed by the Leadership Identification Committee, chaired by Denise McGinn, CAE. The slate includes Steve Pontoni of the Michigan Association for Justice and John Tramontana, CAE, of the Michigan Veterinary Medical Association, who stand nominated to fill two open seats, both with three-year terms. Barring the petition of any write-in candidates from Active Members, the slate will be accepted as presented at the Annual Meeting. 

COVID-19 has completely changed how members view meetings and events. For as long as there are still new cases across the country, potential conference attendees are going to hesitate to join a few hundred (or thousand) of their peers in a singular location and sit in big rooms with other people. While we’re certainly headed in the right direction in many locations (particularly Michigan!), we’re not anywhere close to being out of the woods. 

How will association revenue be impacted by COVID-19? Membership? Revenue from education and meetings? We're all asking these questions and modeling various scenarios as we work through budget projections and chart the path forward. MSAE recently partnered with the Association Societies Alliance and Dynamic Benchmarking on a COVID-19 Impact Survey to get some perspective on these questions. 

The survey focused on four key areas: staffing, professional development budget, gross revenue, and membership. Here's what stood out to me as I reviewed the results for the US and Michigan: 

• • Overall, association executives in Michigan anticipate COVID-19 having a more significant impact on their associations than executives nationally. 
• • Michigan associations were quicker to lay off employees than their national colleagues and more of us may conduct further layoffs in the coming year. 
• • Association executives realize that their own education and professional development will be key to leading their associations through the challenges ahead. 
• • Most association executives anticipate that membership will decline in the coming year. 

Sometimes, it just doesn’t seem fair. As an organization, you spent some big money on a new website to make your association (or company) shine online. But, it’s been a few years now. That shine has begun to wane, as design trends have inevitably changed. The site doesn’t load like it used to, and organic search, once your domain’s strong suit, has become anemic for even the most apt search terms.

So, are you sunk? Probably not. We’ve found two excellent tools to help you gauge where your website’s weaknesses are and how to address them. Best of all? These tools are 100% free.

I like to start out my client meetings with “tell me about your organization” and “tell me about your event.”  These questions don’t directly impact the Audio Visual quote that I will later write, but the answers are invaluable as to how my team approaches the look, feel, suggestions, and options that are available to our clients.  Plus, honestly, it’s one of my favorite parts of this job – learning who we are supporting, and why they do what they do.  It’s usually extremely rewarding to know how we are helping to get the message out and successfully meet the event goals.