While I love launching anything new & seeing it work, I find it even more enjoyable when you can continuously perform. The road to mastery begins with a combination of humility, gratitude and the desire to always ask two questions:

Ask event management professionals about how they actively promote their events, and as many as 90 percent of them will say email marketing is their top preference. Even though email marketing is a common, highly effective & reliable communications method for getting people to attend your event, it remains to be one of the most neglected in terms of the quality and effort that is put into it.

Here are some tips to enhance your marketing emails’ effectiveness:

We have launched a new initiative called the Inbound Lunch Bunch. A series of monthly, informal get-togethers held at ASAE's JW Marriott Conference Center, the program aims to bring together like-minded people interested or practicing inbound. Each month, we'll cover a new topic and have designed the one hour block to be interactive and fast-paced. We will break into groups based on self-selected level of understanding of inbound so that you can easily network with peers and hopefully, find yourself an inbound buddy.

Could this week get even better? It's St. Patrick's Day AND March Madness. I'm coming off an evening where I watched ESPN's 30 for 30 on "I Hate Christian Laettner" and was spurred to comment about the need to constantly pressure yourself to raise your game.We might all have colleagues that we don't like, but Laettner's point was it's not about liking, it's about performance and if that colleague gets you to play to a new level, then that's the best colleague you can have.

We're holding our own March Madness this week at HighRoad with the launch of a series of initiatives designed to help raise our collective game. While we don't work in the same association or company with you, we consider you a colleague--albeit virtual. There's nothing wrong with being virtual and sometimes, the very idea that you've got a colleague out there that has your back can give you the courage you need to be innovative. Similarly, as many of the opposing  players who had to go up against Laettner noted that the mere fact that Christian Laettner was out there in their mind's eye ready to come at them with all he had pushed up the level of preparation and play. 

March is time when we hear and see a lot about luck. The luck of the Irish, wishing your favorite team luck as March Madness begins, or if we are lucky, seeing an end to winter, and a glimpse of spring and melting snow! 

We've been developing quite a few websites lately and I'm interested in hearing what others think about this long-held model of the Primary Navigation Bar. Developed originally as an area to provide a consistent pathway across a collection of content, the primary navigation bar became a staple feature of website best practices in the late 90s and frankly, not much has changed since.