Designing Your Future: Key Trends, Challenges, and Choices Facing Association and Nonprofit Leaders

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Description
Some organizations have a clear sense of how they will shape their future, but many do not. Most are at the start of a new era, with uncertainty about the future being the only thing they count on. How does your organization scan the external environment to identify key trends, issues, and developments that could be of relevance? How do you, as an association leader, use future-focused information to drive future thinking,strategy development, and innovation within your organization and at the board levels?

Keeping abreast of current events is one thing; viewing trends through the lens of implications and action plans for your organization is another. That's where Designing Your Future can serve as a valuable resource. Identifying and analyzing trends, issues, and events that are likely to cause transformational change within the association sector are critical undertakings if associations are to pinpoint and execute their options and opportunities for sustainability, growth, and responsive strategies. Designing Your Future: Key Trends, Challenges, and Choices Facing Association and Nonprofit Leaders is a milestone in ASAE & The Center's Association of the Future research program. It is the first release in a series of planned resources to provide associations with perspectives on the future global environment, including competitive and market issues to formulate plans to capture opportunities rather than react to threats.

Thinking through the implications of the environment that is continually evolving around your organization is not a one-time exercise. It is a continual process of reflection and action. That's why ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership has teamed up with global consulting company Fast Future. Designing Your Future
began with the analysis of several hundred trends. Association leaders and other experts and practitioners have winnowed the lengthy list of impacts to the most critical trends ranging from social to economic to political to environmental to technological impacts likely to affect associations. Use Designing Your Future and subsequent resources to prepare yourself, your board, and your staff to anticipate and plan for the realities of the world in which we all work.


"A clear understanding of the changing environment is imperative for association leaders to plan effectively and make the best possible strategic decisions. Representing the collected wisdom of hundreds of executives, this report is a compendium of key trends to consider and challenges that must be addressed in order to thrive in this time of rapid change. As we develop our own strategic thinking, it will serve as an essential reference."

Robert H. Rich, Ph.D., CAE
Assistant Secretary for Strategic Planning & Evaluation
American Chemical Society

(2008, ISBN 0-88034-298-6, 240 pages, soft cover)

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