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		<title><![CDATA[StarChapter Blog]]></title>
		<link>http://www.starchapter.com/</link>
		<description><![CDATA[]]></description>
		<language>en-us</language>
		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Jun 2013 03:10:49 -0400</pubDate>
		<lastBuildDate>Tue, 18 Jun 2013 03:10:49 -0400</lastBuildDate>
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		  <title><![CDATA[Top Technology Tools for Managing and Promoting Your Association]]></title>
		 <description><![CDATA[
Managing a membership organization takes a lot of work. Planning events, recruiting members, handling communications  and ndash; the work never seems to end. Luckily, there are plenty of technology tools you can use to assist you with administrative and promotional tasks.
Read on for our suggestions of services to use for your organization.
Managing Your Association

File Sharing Tools  and ndash; Isn't it a pain to email that draft of the newsletter to the committee to approve it? Not to mention trying to integrate the multiple revisions you receive into the original document.  Using a file sharing service, such as DropBox allows you to easily have multiple people access a document.  In addition, a file sharing service is a great place to provide access to members to items such as the association handbook, directory, or other items. 


Membership management software  and ndash; Keeping all your members' data together in one place is a breeze with management software; hopefully you are taking advantage of all the tools provided by StarChapter to keep your data organized and up to date.  Online event registration is a terrific feature of StarChapter's association management software. Forget the days of asking people to send an email or worse yet, snail mail a registration form.

Promoting Your Association Online

Video  and ndash; Posting videos on platforms such as YouTube will increase your promotional reach as well as your website's Google ranking. Why not record the educational segment of your next meeting and post it online? To be make the most of your video promotional efforts, be sure to add a keyword rich description of your video and include your association's website address.


LinkedIn  and ndash; For professional organizations it makes sense to have a presence on LinkedIn. Having a LinkedIn page for your association is a great place to start, but for a father reach consider creating a group where members, prospects and others can share and engage in conversation with each other.


SlideShare  and ndash; Posting content on SlideShare will increase your online promotional reach. SlideShare is a platform for sharing primarily presentations, but video and documents can also be posted.  Best case scenario, you already have presentations already created for your events that you can post on the site.  Like with YouTube, be sure to add a keyword rich description to increase your search odds both within the platform and on search engines. In this age, many of your prospects will find your association through online content.

Using the technology advancements available to you will help with promoting and managing your membership organization. You have enough to do already, so why not save administrative and promotional time by making use of the resources available to you?]]></description>
		  <link>http://www.starchapter.com/blog.php?id=71</link>
		  <pubDate>Tue, 11 Jun 2013 14:09:49 -0400</pubDate>
		  <guid>http://www.starchapter.com/blog.php?id=71</guid>
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		  <title><![CDATA[Getting to Know Your Association Data]]></title>
		 <description><![CDATA[
By now in business, you surely know making minor corrections along the way can save a lot of effort and expense over a major change down the road. For that reason, keeping an eye on important information related to your association is very beneficial.
Here are three important areas to keep track of for your association.

Event Attendance  and ndash; Has there been a decline in attendance lately? Or hopefully a big boost? Take a look at which events are attracting lots of members. If you notice high attendance at events with a learning session, perhaps that is something you will want to integrate into more meetings.
Prospects  and ndash; Prospects are the top of your sales funnel. Knowing things such as the ratio of prospect that become members help you set goals to understand how many people you need to reach to make your yearly membership goals.
Membership  and ndash; After all that hard work it took to convert prospects to members, you surely want members to stick around for a while. How long is the average member remaining within your organization?What about the overall membership of the association  and ndash; has it grown or shrunk?

Keeping track of what is going on with your membership organization allows you to adjust your strategy to grow your association. Take some time to regularly review your organization's data to allow for changes to your plans as needed.
TIP: Set a monthly reminder on your calendar to review association data.]]></description>
		  <link>http://www.starchapter.com/blog.php?id=70</link>
		  <pubDate>Thu, 09 May 2013 08:45:00 -0400</pubDate>
		  <guid>http://www.starchapter.com/blog.php?id=70</guid>
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		  <title><![CDATA[Admin Update Coming Soon]]></title>
		 <description><![CDATA[New Community Features
We have recently completed testing on the new Community features and are excited to bring you this update. Starting on Monday, April 15 you will be able to opt-in to this update through the admin area of your website. We'll be updating all StarChapter sites to use this new functionality on May 15th. Please contact support if you have any questions.
The update offers many new features including:

Support for newsletters published quarterly, monthly, weekly, or on irregular schedules
Auto-publish and auto-archive articles and announcements
Completely new Forum area
Recurring calendar events
Improved commenting on the blog and forum
Support for catgories on the blog, forum and articles
Email blog posts, forum posts, calendar events, articles and announcements
]]></description>
		  <link>http://www.starchapter.com/blog.php?id=69</link>
		  <pubDate>Thu, 11 Apr 2013 08:01:00 -0400</pubDate>
		  <guid>http://www.starchapter.com/blog.php?id=69</guid>
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		  <title><![CDATA[Tips for Keeping Your Emails Out of the Spam Folder]]></title>
		 <description><![CDATA[
You've spent time carefully crafting a valuable email to send to your organization, so the last thing you want it to do is to go directly to their spam folder. The good news is there are some guidelines you can follow to decrease the odds your newsletter is marked as junk mail.
Let's look at some things that could potentially trigger your email to be labeled as spam.
Subject Line

Don't put your email subject in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. Commonly viewed around the internet as shouting, an abundance of caps is sure to trigger a spam filter. 


Avoid the words "free" or the recipient's name in the subject line as well. But don't let these rules scare you in to leaving the subject line totally blank  and ndash; that's a spam trigger as well.

Email Body

Similar to the subject line, using terms like "free" or "guaranteed" within the email body are flags for spam filters. Don't think you're being tricky by trying to disguise words using characters (such as f*ree) - spam filters have long since caught on to that tactic.


Balance text and images. Sharing images of events and members is a great way to make your newsletter more visually pleasing, but too many images are another spam flag. A good rule of thumb is to have at least two lines of text per image.

Settings

Provide both text and HTML versions of your newsletter. In addition to helping you pass the spam filter, this is good practice in case the recipient is unable to read HTML email.


Avoid attaching a large file in a format other than PDF or image (JPG, GIF, and PNG). If you have a big file to share with everyone, consider hosting it on your server and providing a link for the recipients to download the file.

Newsletters and emails to your members and prospective members are great ways to keep them informed about your association. By following these guidelines, your messages are more likely to end up in their Inbox. ]]></description>
		  <link>http://www.starchapter.com/blog.php?id=68</link>
		  <pubDate>Wed, 10 Apr 2013 08:18:00 -0400</pubDate>
		  <guid>http://www.starchapter.com/blog.php?id=68</guid>
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		  <title><![CDATA[Event Registration]]></title>
		 <description><![CDATA[With the increased daylight and warmth spring brings, you will want to spend more time checking out prospective golf courses for that summer outing, rather than managing the details of the event.
Because your membership data is fully integrated with your events, your planning is simple.
StarChapter provides you with the ability to:

Create event registration with multiple pricing options and discounts


Accept online payments for events


Get detailed transactional and analytical reports about the event



Visit our Event Registration page for more detailed information.]]></description>
		  <link>http://www.starchapter.com/blog.php?id=67</link>
		  <pubDate>Wed, 10 Apr 2013 07:26:00 -0400</pubDate>
		  <guid>http://www.starchapter.com/blog.php?id=67</guid>
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