There’s a membership association for everything…

by Ben Martin CAE on March 27, 2007 · 6 comments

…except for membership professionals. Does anyone else think that’s the ultimate irony?

If you haven’t read the comments to my post over at Acronym on membership, please click on over…

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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }

Wes Trochlil March 27, 2007 at 6:30 pm

Sure it’s ironic, but being a free-market person myself, it simply suggests there’s no need for it. “Membership” in and of itself doesn’t really mean much. All the other things membership people do (e.g., sales, marketing, customer service, etc.) are covered by MANY other associations.

I can’t imagine what the Association for Association Membership Professionals (AAMP. Slogan: “Let’s get AAMPed.”) could provide that isn’t already being addressed well elsewhere. But then, I’m not that smart… 😉

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Ben Martin, CAE March 27, 2007 at 7:12 pm

Welcome to the conversation, Wes. I’d qualify your response by saying, “there’s no expressed need for it.” Nobody expressed the need for an iPod ten years ago, but look at it now. I’m not advocating for or against a new association for membership pros, but there’s clearly an opportunity to, at the very least, aggregate the information from those MANY other associations into a single source for their benefit. Even better, I’d love to see information from those many associations mashed up and remixed into something for the specialized use of membership pros.

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Fred Simmons March 27, 2007 at 7:50 pm

You could argue most association-related associations are management-oriented and do not specifically cater to membership professionals. Plus “Let’s get AAMPed!” is a embarrassingly corny and awesome slogan. Reason enough to start AAMP.

BTW, there actually were mp3 players 10 years ago. I had one – the Rio. It was 32mb and cost more than a Nano.

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Ben Martin, CAE March 27, 2007 at 9:10 pm

That’s enough space for eight songs using today’s compression. How many songs could you get on there?

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fred simmons March 27, 2007 at 10:17 pm

About 8-12 songs – a little over a half hour of music.

Here’s a pic of the player. It was about the size of the latest iPod.

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Ben Martin, CAE March 28, 2007 at 1:52 am

LMAO! There’s a repeat button! Play the same 12 songs over and over. Technology is amazing.

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