CAPS Resources
CAPS (Coalition of American Plant Societies) is a group that the American Iris Society participates in to learn about similar experiences and challenges. Recently our representative, Bob Pries, attended the 2014 meeting. This is a page to collect some of the resources, ideas, and possible applications for AIS.
The twelve groups that participated in this year's meeting are listed here:
2014 CAPS Meeting list. A summary by the American Conifer Society of this meeting is
here on their website.
Suggested Books
The
Garden Writers Association gave a presentation about their organization's experience and recommended these three books
- The End of Membership As We Know It by Sarah Sladek. Check WorldCat for the book at a Library near you.
- Road to Relevance: 5 Strategies for Competitive Associations by Harrison Coerver and Mary Byers. You can check WorldCat for the book at a Library near you.
- Race for Relevance: 5 Radical Changes for Associations by Harrison Coerver and Mary Byers. Check WorldCat for the book at a Library near you.
Speakers
In addition to the Garden Writers Association, presentations were:
- Holly Shimizu, Executive Director, United States Botanical Garden Cultivating the Passion for Plants
- Kelly Norris, Horticultural Manager, Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden Growing Relevance: The Future of Plant Societies in American Horticulture
Topics for Discussion
Some of the topics many or all of the groups are considering or dealing with are:
- Membership retention and new members including communication with new generations of members and how they perceive the benefits of membership.
- Planned giving such as approaching members for donations.
- Partnering with other groups, either non-profits or for-profits.
Ideas and Results
How do we follow-up on the thoughts that come from conferences such as these. What ideas do you think are most useful? Most feasible? Most important?
Newsletter Resources Page
Note: This idea is one shared on our IrisEditors group. The first five paragraphs are how it was initially expressed. See our
Newsletter Resources page.
The American Orchid Society has a page on its website that might serve as a useful model for us. It has a number of resources for creating a newsletter such as templates, suggestions, and clip art. You can see it at:
http://www.aos.org/Default.aspx?id=591 I have only copied the first part of the page at the bottom of this message.
We could do something similar for newsletters at various levels (Regional, Affiliates) which might make it easier for new editors. Something similar could also be offered for helping Regions and Affiliates with establishing or maintaining a website - I suspect there is a reasonable overlap between editors and webmasters; they certainly have similar problems with obtaining content and presenting it.
This is a bonus from our CAPS membership. I was following some of the links from the recently added CAPS (Coalition of American Plant Societies) page on the Iris Wiki and came to this.
What do you think? Is this worth doing? Are there other parts of AIS that could help us pull this together?
Next Topic
-- %USERSIG{WayneMesser - 2014-07-29}%