AIBS Executive Director's Weekly Blog

I’m taking the step here of committing to make a blog entry at least once a week, and while this still pales in comparison to those who blog daily, I encourage other association executive directors to follow my lead.

It’s taken no small amount of suasion on the part of some AIBS staff and other associates to get me over the hump of worrying about the additional time that regular blog postings might take. In the end, I’ve been won over by seeing blogging as simply an extension—and a bit of a 2-for-1 deal—of the emailing that I, as AIBS’s executive director and CEO, engage in all the time as I respond to, explain, clarify, pitch, and sometimes defend AIBS’s mission activities for an AIBS member or other email correspondent. Many emails of this sort are suitable for reading by a broad audience, so with minimal reformatting I can post them to the AIBS website as a blog entry for search engines to find and all to read (and to comment on, but comments can be set to require approval before going live).

Every executive director and CEO, I argue, has the responsibility to be an effective communicator of his or her organization’s mission activities and focus on behalf of the organization’s board. Many corporate CEOs maintain blogs. For membership-governed associations, even more so, a blog gives a chief executive another way to keep members informed, and perhaps even give them a bit of a peek into the kitchen to see how the meal is being prepared.

I’ll close by noting a favorite website of mine on blogging, that of Wigley & Associates on using blogs as an effective leadership tool. Executive directors and CEOs can take note of the listing there on what to blog about (and think about how many of these you are already doing, so why not get them online for a much larger audience to see?):

• Illustrate your values, mission, goals and strategies
• Provide recognition to an employee, a colleague, an organisation or business in the community
• Leverage your media diet
• Chronicle a decision or a current, unresolved problem
• Teach about a service, program, department
• Point to changes/additions to your website
• Reveal aspects of your non-work life
• Teach about the complexities of an issue