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If you send commercial email messages, text messages, leave voicemail messages or use social media for the purposes of your not-for-profit organization (and frankly, who doesn’t?), then you must pay attention to Canada’s incoming Anti-Spam Law (CASL).

In 2010, the Canadian Government passed its Anti-Spam Act, which was initially welcomed as a safeguard against the deluge of spam we all receive and to combat unwelcome spyware. Roma Ihnatowycz, a frequent contributor to CSAE’s bimonthly magazine, Associations, notes that Canada was in fact “one of the last of the world’s developed economies to embrace such a law,” after sibling Western nations, such as the U.S. and the U.K.

Dave Cybak, executive vice president of the Canadian Society of Association Executives (CSAE) has expressed the concerns of many organizers within the Canadian not-for-profit sector that the new legislation, due to take effect in 2013 or early 2014, is too stringent to be feasible. They say that the CASL threatens to undermine association growth, particularly by severely restraining the ways in which associations can contact their past, current and prospective members. Continue reading “What Does Canada’s Anti-Spam Law (CASL) Mean for Professional (Not-for-Profit) Associations?”

Thank you, readers, for tuning in to my blog postings, this summer. I’m taking a brief holiday from blogging, while I recharge and prepare for late summer and autumn projects. Tune in again, in two weeks, when I plan to discuss some of the broader applications of LinkedIn for professional associations.

Unless you have been transported from the past à la “Star Trek,” you’ll know firsthand, as an association, speaker, or academic that social media can be highly useful for the work that you do.

Looking in today’s blog primarily at professional associations (not-for-profit groups which are not charities), I’m going to discuss in particular some of the challenges that have arisen from the often unprecedented conflicts that can arise from using social media in association culture and what your organization can do to avoid them, before (or as) they appear.

First: social media can be useful to associations in the areas of advocacy, information and action.

Towards Advocacy: an association can raise interest and support for its members. For instance, CSAE can use Linkedin to not only promote its upcoming conference, but to stimulate discussion on a topic or issue that will be addressed more fully at the conference itself. Interested readers of social media can learn about a topic or issue that interests them, be informed about and engaged with it, to support it.

To Inform your Audience: one of the benefits of social media is that it can accurately disseminate quality information easily, efficiently and cheaply. A YouTube video, tweets on Twitter, postings on Facebook can educate the member who’s reading. They may further pick up on a story and repost it to their websites or to forums they belong to. CSAE member, Tim Shaw, Leader of Online Engagement at Amplifi (a company servicing associations and small businesses), has observed that Community Living Ontario, Ontario Long-Term Care Association and the Ontario Real Estate Association have been “trailblazers” in social media engagement and use in Canada, the first of which had 1500 Facebook fans as early as 2010.

To Inspire Action: after social media informs its audience on an issue, the medium enables readers to take action. You can post a form that gets transmitted directly to a local government office, or to a consumer advocate. Shaw notes that the power of social media removes any potential backlog or inefficiencies in participation, in ways that earlier wreaked havoc with methods from a pre-technological age.

In these ways (and this is not meant to be an exhaustive list), social media has immediate usefulness to not-for-profit associations and related groups. Continue reading “Challenges of Using Social Media for Your Association. . .”

Clients of mine often share insecurities in their writing that pertain to grammar and find that their writing is ruled by primary school instructions, “not to start a sentence with ‘and,’ ‘but’ or ‘because.’ ” Another similar injunction is to place commas in places in the sentence where you would pause to breathe, if you were to read your text out loud. Some say further that they use hyphens only “when it feels right.” These “rules” have become what grammar and usage expert Bryan Garner calls “superstitions.” And as an editor, I work to rid my clients of them.

Earlier in my catalog of blog postings, I referred to and followed the writings of “grammar girl,” Mignon Fogarty, since her style and explanations tend to be straightforward (especially for a non-academic client). But I am increasingly finding that questions on usage and style need to be answered in Bryan Garner’s Garner’s Modern American Usage (GM) and in the Chicago Manual of Style (CM; even if you don’t have the very latest edition of the latter). The latter has been highly recommended by many editors, including Michelle Boulton of Michelle Communications; and the two volumes are regularly endorsed (in workshops) by Ruth Wilson of the West Coast Editorial Associates. In response to these technologically advanced times, Garner features a regular email news feed on English usage that is clear and powerful. Continue reading “On Sourcebooks for Editing Grammar and Style . . .”

A case study tells the success story of a service (such as copywriting and/or editing), that describes how an organization solved a challenge by using it or them.

In many ways, it is a “before and after” story, as B2B copywriter Ed Gandia says. It could be from one to four pages in length and may resemble a newspaper or magazine’s “feature story,” with a compelling headline and a sequential series of subheadings that tell the story that the copy details.

The format will be something like “Company X has a problem with Y. They looked for a solution until they found Product Z. They bought and implemented it and since have enjoyed A, B and C Benefits.” As Casey Hibbard writes in Stories that Sell, a “traditional format” for the case study progresses from background to challenge, to solution and to results. The “feature- story format” that I referred to, above (which is closer to journalism) would begin with a strong lead sentence or opening paragraph, followed by descriptive subheads that move the piece along. Continue reading “Why your Professional Association Could Use a Case Study (“Success Story”) to Promote its Services . . . .”