Thursday, October 15, 2009

What Associations Can Learn from Blog Action Day

Each year many thousands of bloggers around the world focus on a single topic for one day. This year the Blog Action Day focus is climate change.

You can play a role in climate change professionally and personally:

How we use energy plays a significant role in what happens with the climate in the future. A bad economy made many people, businesses and families take a strong look at how we use energy. There are money-saving and energy-saving steps such as reducing number of live meetings, encouraging car-pooling, turning down the thermostat in your building, setting timers on your office and home thermostats (to ensure they go down), and really researching what else may lower energy use and related costs. As associations, we can also engage in the public policy debates and decisions that will impact climate change - even if it means additional burden or cost to implement. We're also able to continuously educate about tax incentives, energy programs, and details related to our specific industries.

The success of the concept of Blog Action Day can also be applied within Associations:

1. Polling bloggers and members to see what topic they'd like for focus;
2. Creating your own Blog Action Day on that topic;
3. Ask related industries, media bloggers, others to participate too - and promote their involvement;
4. Designing a badge for use on blogs and web sites that promote the topic;
5. Bringing together those who blog and twitter to work together on that topic by having the one day blog and twitter focus;
6. Adding a call to action and fundraising component, if it applies - if it's a topic worth writing about, readers may want to actually do something - including contribute - show them how;
7. Keep the communication lines open with those who participate.

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