199 Ideas: Raising Revenue


Features include automated tracking, timing, reminders, scheduling polls, professional email invitations, calendar invites, and meeting templates. All your meeting needs in one single app: Integrates with a number of tools including Outlook and Google Drive. Export your notes and documents to Google Drive, Evernote, Dropbox and email. PickTime is a completely free online appointment-making software that makes scheduling a piece of cake. Use it to schedule room times, class bookings, events, and more.

SuperSaaS is a completely customizable online appointment scheduling software. They offer a wide range of options, so that you can set up the booking process to fit any and all requirements you may have, all while keeping the software some of the most affordable available. They offer a free basic version.

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Create public or private forums that can scale to any size. They have a free demo upon request. There are many tools which can become your personal social media assistant, analyzing the effectiveness of your posts, helping you find influencers, and even scheduling your posts for you. Look for private platforms and tools that allow members to engage in meaningful relationships—interact, collaborate, share, learn and solve their top-of-mind problems. Schedule and post tweets right from Tweetdeck. CrazyEgg creates a "heat map" to help you visualize exactly how visitors interact with your website, and lets you export or share the data with other users.

Reaching the limits of maintaining your membership database in Excel? Easily search, update, organize, and filter all your members using this type of software. Wes Trochlil Founder, Effective Database Management "When choosing member management software, I would recommend any organization consider the following five questions:. How many clients does the vendor have that look like my organization? If your organization is mostly organization membership, does the vendor have other clients that have mostly organization membership?

Do you need events registration, product sales, online directories, committee management, exhibit sales? Some vendors have low or no-cost implementation fees with higher monthly fees, while other vendors have high implementation fees and lower monthly fees. Others may have both!

Which model fits your budget and cash flow? What kind of customer support is available, and at what cost? Some vendors provide unlimited customer support with their monthly fees, while others may provide limited support with additional fees. Abila offers web-based SaaS association management software in three editions to meet the diverse needs of member-based organizations.

Organize your contacts, manage leads, follow-up, tasks and activities with this simple CRM. A popular, easy-to-use, yet powerful web-based CRM from 37signals. Track your contacts and conversations, capture notes, get reminders, organize tasks, integrate with your bulk email service, and much more. Works with your iPhone. Memberize is hosted membership site software that provides nonprofits and other organizations with web-based event, membership, communication and Web content management technology.

A fixed monthly price covers the hosted CRM application, support, training, backups and updates. Salesforce is the leading customer relationship management solution. SignMeUp membership management, event registration and donation collection services let your members register themselves and pay online. You can create custom forms, enter offline membership applications, run reports, and create mailing lists. Service fee is 6. TimeLog Project is a web-based system that combines time tracking, project and staff management, customer relations CRM and invoicing tools— everything you need to run a nonprofit, except a website and online community.

Automatic updates and automatic backup. Wild Apricot all-in-one web software helps small associations and nonprofits to automate the 'boring stuff': Free for 3 users with basic features — tasks, call log, calendar, reports, etc. You're not a graphic designer, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to create great visuals! There are many easy-to-use software options that help you quickly create and share stunning videos, presentations, and designs. There are tons of free templates and a huge library of animated assets to choose from.

Bannersnack is an easy-to-use tool that allows anyone to create stunning visuals or animations to promote their website on the internet. You can design beautiful ads starting from their ready-made templates using their free images, shapes, icons, and popular fonts. Design Wizard is online graphic design tool used to create impressive designs without the need for technical expertise. They have a catalog of over 1. An easy inforgraphic and chart making tool with 1,s of templates to choose from.

High-end online presentation tool designed for business-to-business sales. Easily create flow charts, wireframes, and all kinds of other diagrams online, and collaborate with others in real time. Free for 1 user with 2 collaborators, 25 MB, limited document complexity. Free day trial is available for any plan.

Create an online training course from your existing presentations and videos. Instantly create an embeddable slideshow sourced from any RSS feed, from your own list, or from sites such as del. Easily record any video presentation that can be shared with your team. Panopto indexes the content inside your video presentations so that any spoken or shown on-screen word can be searched for. Picatic is simple online event registration and management software that can be set up in five minutes. They make it easy to build a customized event page where you can add your own logo, cover photo, event poster, text, and more.

An online infographics tool with an easy-to-use drag and drop builder and hundreds of simple graphics to choose from.

199 Ideas: Raising Revenue

The simplest tool to create animation, or cartoon presentations. Create your own or edit an already build presentation. Easy-to-follow tutorials for any beginner. Create a visually engaging presentation from scratch or using one of many professional templates. Upload nearly any file format of media, collaborate, and share your presentation. Easily create videos for YouTube, explainer animations, service promotional videos, music visualizations, and more with Renderforest.

Create and publish videos for free. Owned by LinkedIn, with Slideshare is one of the easiest ways to upload and share presentations, infographics, documents and more. Free basic account with an extra charge for HQ or HD video. Ever tried to dig for an attachment in an email that starts like this: Asana is an easy way for teams to track their work. From tasks and projects to conversations and dashboards, Asana enables teams to move work forward.

Free for up to 15 people. Basecamp web-based project management and collaboration software lets you share files, meet deadlines, assign tasks, and centralize feedback. Share, manage and access all your business content online or by mobile. ClutterPad is an online project management and collaboration tool that includes: Free accounts allow you to manage 1 project with 3 users and file storage up to 25MB. An easy and secure way to upload and share any type of file with anyone. Take a look at this nonprofit calendar we created using over 1,, points of data to discover which months other nonprofits are engaging in activities like volunteer recruitment, networking events, yearly goal setting, and board meetings.

EtherPad is an open source, web-based word processor that lets multiple people edit the same document simultaneously with changes shown instantly on everyone's screen. No limit to "undo" levels. EtherPad is free to use, but consider a donation. Evernote is a cross-platform app for mobile or desktop that helps you organize, archive, discuss, and present all your notes. The software is mobile friendly and available on IOS and Android. GenieBelt is free for nonprofit and NGO use as part of their commitment to social responsibility. Goplan lets you manage a group calendar and export or sync with mobile devices , track time, assign tasks and tickets, manage files, collaborate and discuss.

Easily create and share your Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Surveys, and many other files with anyone, anywhere. All you need is the shareable link and people can view, edit, and comment on all your files. GrowinCloud is a comprehensive business management software for small and medium sized organizations. It can help you with online appointment scheduling, contact management, leads capturing, online document management, and more.

Free to sign up. Powerful project management and collaboration tools include whiteboards, discussion forums, file sharing, calendars and task assignment, even phone and web conferencing within your secure online workspace. Plan, track, and organize all your tasks and assign tasks to others. Integrates with Confluence, Bitbucket, HipChat, and many others. LibreOffice is an open sourced software suite, similar to the Microsoft Office Suite that includes a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a presentation program, a graphics editor, and a database management program similar to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.

It's completely free to use for nonprofits. MyCommittee lets you create meeting agendas and minutes, share documents and collaborate, reply to comments, and communicate with members and contacts. PBworks provides a broad set of collaboration products that help businesses work more efficiently and effectively. They serve markets such as advertising and marketing agencies, law firms, and education, as well as the broader business market.

Their pricing is based on a freemium platform with upgrades for more services. Project Desk online project and task management tool provides a virtual workspace for your team to share information and collaborate on projects with task tracking, document sharing, threaded discussions, automated email, and more.

Free for up to 4 users. Redbooth is easy-to-use project management software for creating high-performing team. A messaging app for teams. Easily create a channel about any topic and add whomever you like to the discussion. Create private channels, or direct message others. Browse websites in a shared, real-time whiteboard, annotate, share files, and chat with the people you invite to your brainstorming session.

Trello organizes all your tasks cards into an easy to view, shareable board. Drag and drop cards between lists to show progress.

Add as many people as you need and drag them to cards. Add and reorder lists as you need. Trello adapts to your project, team, and workflow. An online learning website, similar to Learnable, where anyone can teach or take a free or paid web-based course: Share documents, build databases, hold web meetings, manage tasks, calendars, and expense reports,communicate and collaborate online. Wriber uses artificial intelligence to help busy people write better content, faster.

Wriber intuitively searches the web based on what you're writing to provide you with research sources, relevant statistics, related videos, and ideas to spark your thinking, plus it helps you optimize every post for SEO value. A simple checklist app to keep track of all your personal and professional tasks. Take notes, comments, organize your lists into folders, and even share your lists. The list goes on and on. Clubtexting allows easy creation of segments so that you can send targeted texts.

No charge for incoming messages. Supports all major Canadian cell phone carriers as well as US. GMG offers a comprehensive text to donate service which can even be used as a payment processor if you don't have your own. You can get fully set up in about 20 minutes and they offer a money-back guarantee. Reliable text software capable of sending a variety of different campaigns including quizzes, surveys, coupons, and other customizable campaigns. An account manager will work with you one-on-one to deliver the best possible outcome for your team.

Ideas: Raising Revenue

A text messaging service for any type of business, foundation, or association. It allows you to craft personalized text messages, schedule and send out alerts. You can check out the stories of their nonprofit customers in their Case Studies. Pay per outbound text only. There are many tools which can become your personal social media assistant, analyzing the effectiveness of your posts, helping you find influencers, and even scheduling your posts for you.

Shorten any URL and track how many clicks it gets. Bitly basic features are free. Contact for upgraded plans. Buffer allows you to schedule, publish and analyse all your posts in one place and will also share your posts at peak times so that they get max exposure. Free for 1 social media profiles. This tool allows you to see which articles rank highest on social media. A Chrome extension that allows you to see the social media info Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc.

Get notified whenever your organization or any other organization you wish to follow gets mentioned on the internet. Schedule s of posts at a time. Use Suggestions to find great content to share. View scheduled messages by day, week, or month in calendar view.

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Klout is a free tool that measures your influence on social media with a score. A social media monitoring tool that allows you to track your brand, your competition, and relevant news. Their campaign analysis will give you insight into what campaigns worked and why. An all-in-one, easy to use dashboard to write and schedule all your social media posts. Engage, monitor, grow, and measure your posts with in-depth analytics.

A power analytical tool that will track everything from your email marketing, social media, and PPC campaigns. Tweepi helps you identify influencers and tweet at them to gain followers. Created by Twitter, with TweekDeck you can view multiple timelines in one interface with advanced features to help manage multiple twitter accounts.

Schedule and post tweets right from Tweetdeck. Boost your productivity and evaluate how well you and your organization is spending their time with time-tracking software. Each month you can conduct an analyses of how long it takes for you to complete on-going tasks so you can look for ways to improve and scale your work. This includes all the basic features , but can be upgraded later with the management and accounting modules. Cashboard lets you track time, create estimates and invoices, and accept payments online.

Free for 1 active user, 2 active projects,1 client invoiced per month. ClickTime makes it easy to track employee time against the programs and grants you manage. Thousands of organizations use ClickTime to ensure compliance, improve program management, and drive increased funding.

Monitor projects and resource performance, define different tasks, compare estimated time requirements with actual time reports, calculate the project cost based on the time reports submitted by the users, create Gantt charts and more. A browser bookmarklet lets you quickly pop up a timer; tag and log your hours right from there when each task is done. A limited free account is also available: Part of the OfficeClip business suite, you can download and install Web Timesheet and Expenses on your computer or use the hosted version online. A free trial is available. Costs for the OfficeClip applications will depend on the version and tools selected, number of users, file space, etc.

Real time dashboards and reports let you instantly see all project time, cost and billing information. Contact the company for a demo and pricing information. There are many volunteer management tools that can track, schedule, and automate a lot of the work. Easily keep track of all your volunteers on the cloud. Features include volunteer application forms, training tracking, email communication, scheduling and reporting. Donorsnap will handle all your registrations, online donations, and even recurring donations.

All-in-one community engagement software that can help recruit, manage, track and retain volunteers. Samaritan also offers integration with a wide range of platforms like Facebook and PeopleSoft. Independently rated 1 software for volunteer recruiting and management. Built-in live criminal checking and e-campaigns. A full volunteer planner featuring customizable sign up pages, email tracking and delivery, a full scheduling assistant and donation collecting.

Volunteer management tool for recruiting and analysing volunteers. Other features include donor management, email marketing, and payment processing. A comprehensive volunteer management system with scheduling, tracking, reporting, volunteer portal, group tracking, and text and email communication.

Start a free trial, or a trial pre-loaded with sample data. If you have a large volunteer base, VolSoft will help you keeps track of your volunteers and creates statistical reports on their activity.

Each volunteer will have their own unique profile and sign in and out of. Volunteer Scheduler Pro is an all-in-one management system for Volunteers. Features include, flexible scheduling, automatic reminders, online substitutions, custom enrollments, email, reporting, and tiered access. Access WhenToHelp on the cloud to create and publish schedules, notify volunteers automatically with email and text messages, and find replacement volunteers quickly.

You have a good website, but you want to make it better. An easy way to understand where there's room for improvement is by integrating an analytical tool. If you're maintaining a membership database, here are 10 mandatory membership fields to keep track of. Andrew Garberson Search Department Manager, Lunametrics "Nonprofits have unique tracking and reporting challenges because goals can be difficult to quantify in dollars, especially compared to ecommence or other sectors. How do you put a monetary value on finding a new volunteer or spreading mission awareness?

I urge my nonprofit partners to start the web analytics process offline on a whiteboard with two columns: Google Analytics is often the obvious next step because it is easy to implement and free for most nonprofits. It's peas-and-carrots partner is Google Tag Manager, which allows nonprofits to turn nearly any type of website engagement into a trackable conversion that we can report on with Analytics.

Google has some great documentation on both tools to get started or marketers can visit me at an in-depth LunaMetrics training where I'll talk their ear off about the power of Google's free web analytics tools. Clicky is a real-time web analytics service. Free plan allows you to track 1 site, up to 3, pageviews daily. CrazyEgg creates a "heat map" to help you visualize exactly how visitors interact with your website, and lets you export or share the data with other users. Google's FeedBurner provides custom RSS feeds and management tools to web-based content publishers, including an email subscription service and an optional advertising system.

Track how many people have subscribed to your RSS feeds and with what service or program. Google Analytics is a powerful web analytics solution, now with Google Adwords integration to track the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns. Detailed reports help you learn who your website visitors are, where they come from, and how they interact with your website. Why wait months for site code updates? Google Tag Manager lets you launch new tags any time with a few clicks, so you never miss a measurement or marketing opportunity. Google's collection of webmaster resources are invaluable to answer your crawling and indexing questions, help you to increase traffic to your site, and connect you with your visitors.

Histats offers unlimited and unrestricted real-time website traffic statistics with forecast and comparison charts to help you understand visitor trends for every page or group of pages on your site. Track web traffic and feed subscription patterns with Mint, an extensible, self-hosted website analytics program with an easy-to-use interface. Full free plan, and a 15 day free trial of the premium version. QuestionPro's Nonprofit Waiver Program offers registered nonprofit organizations free access to the survey software for data-collection and analytics for as long as they need.

StatCounter is an invisible web tracker aimed at websites with , pageloads per month or less, offering real-time traffic statistics for multiple websites, lifetime summary stats, and a detailed analysis of your last pageloads. Many common features include a custom domain, a blog, and member-only areas. There are many advantages for cloud software, my favorite being the automatic upgrades. In addition, a cloud software can easily be accessed by site administrators from any computer with an internet connection and a browser.

Look for software that gives you direct access to your website with a content management system CMS — a tool that will allow you to make easy edits to the website. Additional factors that you should look into include: For more information about these deciding factors read this article: CFSites offers a simple way for people with limited technical skills to create a website for their cause. Features include a setup wizard and visual editor, 3MB storage, your own URL, and more than a dozen templates. Doodlekit is a fully hosted online website builder and CMS Content Management System that helps anyone from first-timers to web designers build a website with blogs, forums, shopping carts, custom forms and more.

A website builder with built-in email marketing to make it easy to keep in touch with your audience. Elevation Web is a full-service agency that builds high-quality websites for nonprofits. They specialize in website design, graphic design, search marketing, and copywriting. Contact them for a quote.

Point-and-click, drag-and-drop website builder for non-techy users. Customizable templates, site stats. Easy website builder with online store option. Hosted Manila is the software-as-a-service Saas version of UserLand Software's Manila web publishing and blogging application. Create dynamic Flash homepages, hosting included. MorWeb is a responsive design CMS website builder and blogging platform. It's used by non-technical people to quickly create and update responsive website designs in the cloud without any coding.

They have a free demo upon request. Built on the Joomla! Salesforce can be integrated so users can manage their own contact information. RedTim is a beautiful website builder that helps you easily rank in organic search results. Unlike other website builders, it comes ready-to-go with built-in SEO functions. SITE allows you to easily build a website quickly, even from your mobile phone.

They provide many professionally designed templates, but options are limited in order to prevent you from making design mistakes. Features include free hosting SEO tools, a free image library, and unlimited webpages. Tumbler is the easier way to share your content and build a following. Email them for a special discount for verified nonprofits.

Wix has plenty of templates to choose from for any type of website. Features include a drag and drop builder, custom domain name, one-pager websites, and mobile responsiveness. The hosted version of Wordpress blogging software is available in over 50 languages. Set up a single-author or group blog public, private, or password protected on a Wordpress. Yola formerly SynthaSite is a website builder with drag-and-drop technology that makes it easy for anyone to create a website and to add popular social media widgets, PayPal or Google online stores, blogs, chatroom, and more.

From maintaining a contact database, to coordinating events, processing payments, managing member communication, and building your website… the list goes on and on. Don't spread yourself thin trying to learn so many different systems. All-in-one software can rid you of this headache. Contact the company for pricing. Blackbaud incorporates nearly every tool a nonprofit of any type and size could ever need. Look through their A-Z list of more than 20 products.

Community Enterprise modules allow organizations to manage many key activities online in one open-source software system, wither hosted by CitySoft or on your own server. Free demo and free trial on request. All-in-one event management including features for conferences, on-site check-in, email marketing and payment processing. DonorPerfect organizes all your donor information in one database, making it easy to stay close to your best supporters, track gifts, send thank you notes, produce fundraising appeals and track campaign effectiveness.

MemberMouse is an easy to use WordPress membership plugin that allows you to sell products, subscriptions and memberships, setup a password protected member's area, offer 1-click upsells and downsells, manage customers, automate customer service, track critical retention metrics and more. MemberClicks is an all-in-one website solution including an online CMS and permission-based group management to donation forms for collecting information and payments. Tendenci membership management software is a comprehensive Web site solution designed for large associations. A full line of web applications developed for synagogues and Jewish nonprofits: All-in-one business website solution features include web hosting, e-commerce, CMS content management system , CRM customer relationship management , site analytics and reports, blogs, and email marketing tools.

Contact the company for prices. YourMembership is a complete online member community and membership management system. Features include website design and hosting, invoicing, analytics and email marketing. Try it Free for 30 Days. Home Features Pricing Examples Themes. About Blog Forums Help Contact. Regular pricing Multi-chapter pricing Wild Apricot vs.

Advisory Group Members in Focus Podcast. For example, it can: Process online payments for events, membership, renewals, and donations Update an easy to search and filter contact database Improve member communication through automated invoices, emails, and newsletters Easily create a website where you can host events, donations, news, a blog, member-only resources, a directory, and more Instantly access simple financial reports and analytics And more Wild Apricot is the number one provider of membership management software , used by over 20, organizations.

How to Raise Money as an Entrepreneur

Of course there are many more options that can solve any manual task your nonprofit is doing right now, like: Walking your donation cheques to the bank? You need an online payment processing tool. Sending out snail mail member notifications? Switch to texting software. Don't have time to update all your social accounts? Try social media scheduling software. Tim Chan Manager of Support, FreshBooks "The right accounting software should make running your organization easier, not harder. While this may be true for large nonprofits that have the luxury of a full-time accounting department on hand, most smaller organizations can benefit from much simpler accounting software.

Software designed exclusively for small organizations can help non-accountant team members more easily manage day-to-day tasks like collecting online payments from donors, tracking expenses, and running reports. Admin Bandit Admin Bandit is web-based accounting software designed for those with no accounting experience.

FreeAgent This web-based software is designed to help small business, partnerships and solo entrepreneurs who are not accountants to stay on top of all aspects of their finances, from estimates and proposals to invoices, expenses, bank statement reconciliation, profit and loss reports, and key dates for tax preparation. FreshBooks FreshBooks online invoicing service lets you track time and expenses, create, send and track invoices and estimates, and collect payments quickly. Hiveage Online billing and invoicing software Hiveage lets you add unlimited clients and create unlimited invoices, accept payments online through Paypal and Google Checkout, and import and export your data.

Quickbooks A cloud accounting software that allows you to access your data on any device. Rerun Rerun is for any business, organization or association that wants to automate their recurring, subscription or membership billing and accept recurring payments via credit card and ACH. Ronin Ronin online invoicing and time tracking application allows your entire team to track time on the same projects, supports recurring invoices with custom time intervals, and allows you to accept online payments via PayPal or Authorize.

Sage One Sage One Accounting is full-featured bookkeeping software made simple. Leading From the Outside In "To truly engage and compete, you must go beyond social interaction to create communities of shared purpose that produce concrete outcomes for all stakeholders.

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CreateAForum A free online forum tool which supports unlimited posts, topics, and boards. Gong Project The Gong Project is a real-time web text and voice communication tool. Lefora Free forum hosting with 2 GB storage, automatic spam detection, theme customization, rich media support, sidebar widgets, community voting, and more.

Nabble Free forum and other fully customizable apps include mailing list, photo gallery, news and blog you can embed on your own website. Ninja Post One-click setup for a message board with social integrations. QuickTopic Suitable for a quick group discussion, QuickTopic lets a group of people get and post messages in a private web forum, by email or browser.

Events Management, Registration, Scheduling Tools Events are one of the best ways to attract new members, but they can also be extremely overwhelming. Amilia Registration, reporting, CRM, fundraising, billing and more, Amilia is a complete event management tool for any organization. ASAP ASAP is a turnkey online scheduling and registration tool, designed for communities, schools and businesses to manage their events and classes.

Bizzaboo An all-in-one event platform offering a website builder, mobile app, CRM, and analytics. Eventbrite for NonProfits Set up an online registration page for your nonprofit event in minutes, then take advantage of Eventbrite's promotional tools to send email invitations or publicize your event on social networks. Event Wizard Event Wizard lets you create and manage online registration websites for your events, each loaded with a full suite of event management tools.

RegOnline RegOnline is a web-based event management solution with powerful functionality: Pricing available upon request, discount for nonprofits Regpack Regpack enables organizations to register applicants quickly and effectively. Reservio Reservio is a simple scheduling tool. ScheduleOnce ScheduleOnce is an online scheduling service that enables all meeting attendees to compare real-time availability and quickly find the best time for all. Setster Embed a scheduling widget on your website to show times and services; visitors request an appointment time, and Setster sends confirmation emails to both parties.

Clients understand how manually scheduling appointments is a waste of time and resources, ripe for human error and customer attrition. Contact them for their nonprofit discount. Fundraising Software, Online Payments, Donor Management Tools When it comes to fundraising, you want to spend more time generating leads, and less time completing paperwork. ActiveGiving ActiveGiving enables online donations, campaign management, event registration, fundraising consultation and management, ticket sales, membership services, recurring gifts and online auctions for nonprofits.

DataIdeal Online donor management software for small to medium-sized nonprofits, lets you track contact information and history including grant proposals as well as tracking donations, printing and emailing receipts, and managing expense reports. DonorPerfect DonorPerfect provides a complete fundraising and donor management solution to help you reduce your workload and build relationships with your constituents. Getting Started Building Sponsorship Partnerships 6. DonorTools Donor Tools is a nonprofit donor database to help charities and churches make smart decisions and raise more money.

Double the Donation Matching Gift Software Double the Donation is an all-in-one donation software for nonprofits looking to increase revenue through matching gifts.

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By Meredith Low Conferences are under more pressure than ever. Technology is changing the relationship between physical proximity and activities like learning, networking, and collaborating. Delegates find it increasingly difficult to secure funding and time to attend. Industry sponsors are questioning their return on investment, seeking to quantify and justify their marketing decisions. Conferences can be complex to manage, and costs difficult to contain. By Pam Graham, DMCP There are various reasons why associations turn to event planners to supplement and become an extension to their team. Among the most common are creativity and protection.

This can include access to private clubs, hidden gems, and discount volume pricing. Another reason to choose an event planner is to save time. Using an outside contractor relieves you of the research, creative and negotiation time, allowing you to focus on meeting content and speakers. By Barry Siskind Trade shows have long been a valuable service for members of associations as well as a great source of revenue to fund association programs. The result has been an overabundance of shows of all sizes and descriptions.

But the scene is changing dramatically as we move into the 21st century.