I just returned from NAR’s Association Executive Institute in Colorado Springs. It was a great conference! The host location for all the meetings was the Broadmoor. The facilities were nice for a meeting of this size. I just wish I could have been able to stay at the Broadmoor, however the rooms were booked so I stayed closer into town.

The opening session was one of the highlights of the meeting for me. The keynote address given by Nido Qubein was right on. I wrote down a lot of his quotes, “out of adversity can emerge phenomenal abundance. We will come out smarter and more focused”, “who you spend time with is who you become”, “for the confident change is opportunity”, “go beyond selling to positioning” and many more. Several tips I came away with are: In these times we should be reading and listening more than ever. Don’t become victims of the now. Your beliefs will define your behaviour and instead of making “to do lists” make a “TO BE LIST”.

Other sessions I attended that I enjoyed were: Selling your association to your members, Road trip with Alice and Gar, Be a Wiki-Web wonder, Scaling new business models, Legislative advocacy lunch, Surviving a market change, A media makeover for your association and the NAR update lunch. I did several sessions of the Social Media Lab including: Using social media, news flash, using Google aps and will you be my friend? These were put on by NAR’s CRT folks and I learned a lot from them.

Because I am a note taker I have 14 pages of notes to refer back to and hopefully gain some insight and tips to use in my daily work. The conference was great for giving me new ideas and new ways of looking at things to improve communication with my members and the public. New ideas to draw people to the association website. Tips for offering more for less. Ways to organize the mounds of articles, newsletters, blogs, social networking sites that I look to for relevant information for my members. Online applications that can make work flow easier between myself, the boards of directors and committees. And least but not last how to keep the association relevant and survive today’s market.

Overall, it was a great opportunity and conference.