There are many ideas here. If you are already using some - wonderful! Try some new ideas this year.

Before: Contact local media. Offer press interviews with your expert members - about association issues and importance to local community. Send your media package to media before you arrive. Include information about your association, your publication, your conference outline, and key contact names for interviews. Ask local convention bureau to help establish contact. Then follow-up.

Get more value from your speakers. Ask your high profile speakers to donate a speech to a school, charity group, service group, community association or city hall. You might be spending several thousand dollars for their presentation and travel. Ask them for a little bit more. Offer speaker a token amount to do this additional community work on behalf of your association. Make sure attendees to this community speech know you are sponsor. And tell media.

Ask your speakers to do media interviews. Get a media kit from each. Give them your media contacts and encourage them to contact media directly. Remind your speakers to talk about your association when they are interviewed.

Connect with local community. Invite local students from high schools, college or university to attend (free) portions of your conference. Make contact with teachers, professors, or department heads. Ask your host chapter to arrange this. The teachers might select students or you might hold a contest to pick winners.

Arrange an event with a local school, group or charity. Contact university, college, high schools, Junior achievement, Chamber of Commerce or charity. Ask what you can do for them to help their cause and issues.

During: Send post cards to your members who did not attend. Give every attendee five post cards to mail. Buy local tourist shots or custom print them. "Wish you were here."

Just as in science, magnetic companies and brands are ones that are aligned and “pulling” in same direction. Magnetism works when electrons are charged and line up in same direction. In much same way, when businesses are charged behind a unified and coherent message, employees and customers alike will begin to align themselves to that vision. The target customer is no longer a “target”, since they begin to find you. The emphasis slowly shifts from atrificially capturing customers to naturally attracting them.

Magnetism then comes from a distilled and powerful sense of purpose. This purpose revirberates throughout organization and intuitvely instructs organization’s members to act and behave in ways that promote this vision. The cost of top down driven, internal messaging is greatly reduced. The process becomes more natural, more fluid and instinctive.

So is this purpose same as a mission statement or brand strategy?

Yes and no. Most mission statements are written in boardrooms and sit in nice plaques on walls. Purpose is something that comes from heart, and it needs to come from heart of top management. Again, this is about alignment, and if top management is all about maximizing bottom line, it cannot create a magnetic company whose mission statement expounds virtues of altruistic, self sacrificing service. It just won’t vibrate, resonate and ultimately attract desired customer. So you can also say magnetic companies are genuine in nature. Their values are consistant at all levels of organization. Profit then becomes a natural byproduct of doing what company believes in, whether it’s delivering on price, quality or service.