Education Sessions

Are Your Courses Built for Yesterday’s Student or Today’s Learner?

Are you relying on volunteer subject-matter experts alone to build your professional development content? If they’re like most, they are experts in their field of study but not experts in designing learning programs. This often leaves us with libraries of content that range from narrated PowerPoints to recorded conference sessions focused on knowledge rather than performance. Work through a real-life case study. Learn about an association that transformed a core competencies course from an ineffective lecture to an immersive online experience. You’ll experience the value of partnering your experts, who know your content intimately, with experts who know how to design content for today’s learners. Great design generally results in shorter courses that are immediately applicable to the learners.  Leave with the process that will help you build this kind of learning at your organization.

Association Leaders Situation Room: Solving Today’s Real-World Challenges

Step back into the Situation Room—an engaging, solution-driven forum created exclusively for association leaders navigating today’s most pressing issues. This highly interactive session brings peers together to surface real challenges, share practical insights, and collaborate on actionable strategies you can implement immediately. In this fast-paced, candid, and collaborative dialogue, you will gain fresh perspectives, strengthen peer connections, and leave with proven tools to lead with confidence, adaptability, and resilience.
Come ready to participate, problem-solve, and elevate your leadership impact—together.

Jim Anderson, CAE, President, Associations West

Jeff Milde, Owner/CEO, Calma Association Management Company
Kim Gusman, President & CEO, California Employers Association
Stephanie Stephens, Executive Director, California Park & Recreation Society

From Mundane to Meaningful: Humanizing Engagement through Tech and Recognition

Associations often adopt technology to save time, but one of its greatest potentials is in amplifying the humanity of engagement. This session explores how moving “From Mundane to Meaningful” can transform member, staff, board, and volunteer experiences by blending automation with authentic recognition. Routine processes like onboarding, communications, or feedback can become opportunities for personalized interaction, meaningful data, and retention when designed intentionally. In this interactive session, participants will experience how recognition functions not just as a celebration but as a strategic driver of loyalty, retention, and leadership pipelines. Through practical frameworks and interactive discussions, attendees will acquire tools to align automation with human connection, cultivating leadership and feedback data across their organizations through conversational-style campaigns. Walk away with actionable insights to reframe technology as a force for building trust, retention, and long-term impact.

Candice Graham, Assistant Director of Membership, American Physical Society

Your Conference Format Is Obsolete - Designing Conferences For Connection

The current conference format seems obsolete. Keynote, breakout, meals, networking. Rinse and repeat. A majority of attendees' feedback is that they love most about conferences the connections they make, yet we offer few opportunities for connection. We will discover how to design events that actively involve and energize attendees. In this highly interactive session, participants will test hands-on, experiential conference formats in real time, experiencing exactly what engagement feels like from the attendee perspective. You’ll leave with practical ideas, tools, and techniques you can apply immediately to create more dynamic, memorable events that keep your attendees coming back year after year.

Jeff Harry, Discover Your Play

Best Board Ever: Intentional & Strategic Recruitment That Leverages Thought Leadership

Does your Board represent the make up of your membership and industry? Do you have a full spectrum of perspectives, thoughts and expertise around your leadership table? How can you build your leadership bench? Explore how to move beyond an ‘open call’ recruitment and last-minute appointments toward a year-round, intentional process that reflects the organization’s membership, vision, and mission to support the strategic direction. Discusss how to identify gaps through board matrix assessments, diversify your leadership pipeline, and how to implement transparent recruitment and onboarding practices. Whether your organization is navigating leadership transitions or building the foundation for stronger representation of the full ecosystem of your association, this session provides both strategy and practical tools, examples, and insights that leaders can immediately apply.

Alison Hart, Founder & Chief Strategist, A. Hart Associates  

Forecast Fluency: Learning How to Look Ahead

The aftermath of a pandemic, societal disruption, economic threats…from one challenge to the next, our organizations and leadership have faced crisis after crisis.  The silver lining is that with each challenge comes an opportunity. The ability to forecast these challenges and opportunities is a priceless skill. Intuitive foresight is the key ability to track trends – past, present, and future – and translate them into likely possibilities of tomorrow.  This session will step through a process of trend identification that can be used for any association or industry, helping volunteer leaders & staff alike to look up to the horizon and focus on what will most enable mission advancement. 

Peer-Powered Lab: Conferences & Events

Roll up your sleeves and jump into this fast-paced, interactive lab built for meetings and events pros who learn best by doing (and sharing!). This session puts the spotlight on you and your peers—no long lectures here. Swap ideas, solve real-world challenges, and crowdsource creative solutions with professionals who get it. Whether you’re tackling engagement, logistics, budgets, or bold new formats, you’ll leave inspired, energized, and armed with practical takeaways you can use right away. Come curious, come vocal, and be ready to power up your meetings and events—together!

When You Know Too Much:  Overcoming a Common Psychological Bias to Boost Non-Dues Revenue

It’s a bit of a crazy paradox, but the more well-versed you are in a particular subject, the more challenging it can be to understand or communicate with those who have limited or no knowledge of the same subject. It’s called the “curse of knowledge” or “the insider effect.” Chances are you experience this phenomenon in everyday life:  It’s why we sometimes leave the doctor’s office a little confused about what they said; why a less-skilled cook doesn’t get the same results as Gordon Ramsey; and why our teenagers leave their laundry in the washing machine indefinitely. The insider effect is also a common reason why associations struggle to connect with prospective sponsors, exhibitors, and advertisers, but it’s also easy to correct once you know what to look for. In this fun, interactive session, you’ll step out of your “me” shoes and into your “them” shoes to see your association from the perspective of corporate buyers.  From there, you’ll see exactly what needs to change to close the knowledge gap between you and your prospects for improved non-dues revenue results. 

Carrie McIntyre, Principal, Navigate