A couple of weeks ago, I received a postcard promoting a couple who could provide an entertaining and motivational presentation for my next MEETING.

In my lexicon, meetings are business-oriented, have a defined agenda of topics to be addressed and decisions to be made. Meetings lead to action items. The types of meetings I’m thinking of are:

• Web course development meetings with Web developers, graphic artists, instructional designers, editors. 
• Meetings with clients to identify what the course will cover.
• Meetings with the company leadership to discuss anticipated revenue goals over the next quarter.  

Meeting planners are uniquely qualified, highly-detailed, “Is that the worst you can throw at me?” types of people who understand the appropriate ratio of Diet to regular drinks; the best layout of coffee urn, cream carafe, spoons, napkins, and trash bin so the refreshment line doesn’t get clogged up. All that, and they will keenly negotiate a hotel contract to get the maximum number of comped suites, and the best rate on AV, all based on an almost always dead-accurate attendance estimate.

What meeting planners do is very different from what I do. My work begins well before the meeting planner is involved: developing events around what our members need and want to know; defining the educational objectives and actionable outcomes; finding the best qualified facilitators, trainers, or speakers to cover the content; organizing the flow to make sure enabling objectives lead to terminal objectives; and on and on.

Even if the same person covers all of these responsibilities, planning effective educational content is not the same thing as planning an effective meeting.

“Why do associations always blur these lines?” I asked a colleague.

She smiled at me, her patience so far intact. It wasn’t the first time she had to explain to me what seemed to others to be so obvious: many associations don’t have separate educational events. Many associations have one in-person gathering each year, and it combines the business meeting with a special speaker.

Oh! So that explains the postcard.

How would you describe your event? What’s the intended outcome of your annual gathering? Other events? Are they meetings? Educational sessions? Do you provide both?

Whether you’re a meeting planner or the director of education in your association, or handle the responsibilities of both, you need to be clear about the purpose event (make business decisions? train attendees on the latest regulatory requirements in the industry?). The purpose drives how the content needs to flow – will you need guest experts, motivational speakers, discussion facilitators, or content trainers? Will you need a combination? How much time do you have? What sorts of handouts or take-aways can you provide your attendees? What environment do participants need to be engaged with the content?

Got all that? Okay, now it’s time to think about the meeting planning elements…. how should the room be arranged? Should their be a podium? Lapel mic? Refreshments in the room or just outside?

If you handle everything from content development through the final details of the room set-up and F&B, it’s easy to think of yourself of having one job.

No wonder things are blurred. Focus on the two areas of expertise you’re working within: education/training and meeting planning. You probably won’t be able to convince your CEO or ED that you need double pay, but defining yourself as filling two roles will enable you to be even more effective in each. And that, my friend, means your members will benefit even more from your professional expertise.

Are you a meeting planner? And education professional? Both? What do you think? How do you balance the two?

I’m feeling nostalgic for the technology conference.  I was honored to have been invited to be a content leader last year, but a scheduled review of one of our live events prevented me from attending this year.  After having met fellow ASAE and The Center members during the eLearning Conference and via other contacts over the last year, I would have loved to have been in D.C. to connect in person and gather all the knowledge my brain could absorb!

So I’m following what I can about the conference via the Web — this entry by David Sobol in his Associated Knowledge blog for example. 

And being grateful that if I had to miss the conference because I had to be someplace else, that at least that “someplace” was Miami.

Jeff Cobb offered a great presentation at the recent eLearning Conference hosted by ASAE and The Center, and posts about trends in association elearning in his blog, Mission to Learn.

During my attendance at the conference — and I made nearly every chat and session –I was impressed by the range of what associations are doing educationally, online.  I was also amazed that there was so much talk and curiosity about the newest wave of online options — wikis, blogs, social networking, virtual worlds… especially Second Life, which I consider one of the leading-edge playspaces on the Web, populated primarily by geeks (I mean that in the most positive way, considering myself a “wannabe geek”) and entrepreneurs.

What surprises me about this is that from what I can tell, associations — by and large — are still struggling with the best ways to get buy-in from leadership to get into or expand online learning options, strategize those options, sort out the possibilities, figure out the budgeting, and then tackle the implementation of it all.

Because I came into the association world from the corporate Web world, I find this both inspirational and scary.  I’m inspired by the unfettered curiosity and eagerness to jump in and do it.  I’m scared for the associations that make that flying leap — without first understanding what makes online learning work — or not work — in the first place.

Maybe because I’m so new to associations that I’m convinced (correctly or not) that I can see things more clearly from the sidelines than the players can, but here are a few things I picked up on:

• Association staffers in charge of elearning wanted solutions to problems with content, subject-matter experts, finances, technology, and other operational issues.  Questions kept coming up like, “How much would that cost?” and “How do I justify this to our leadership?”
• Associations offering elearning expressed frustration at having lower attendance/registration than anticipated, invested money in systems that disappointed or didn’t work, more to do than resources or time to implement, among other issues.
• No one seems absolutely clear about what all the online options are, how they are best used, and how to make the decisions that effectively map the needs to the solutions.  “Do I need an LMS or not?” ”If we offer asynchronous learning, don’t we have to have a live component like a chat to go with it?”

ASAE and The Center did a great job pulling this together, and the presenters tackled their topics with enthusiasm.

But it was clear to me that there’s a disconnect between the vendors and clients, between what’s perceived as important and what truly is, and between an often-used solution and the right solution.