Writing Newsletter Quotes

I’ve watched congregations devote years and years to heated arguments about whether a female missionary should be allowed to share about her ministry on a Sunday morning, whether students older than ten should have female Sunday school teachers, whether girls should be encouraged to attend seminary, whether women should be permitted to collect the offering or write the church newsletter or make an announcement . . . all while thirty thousand children die every day from preventable disease. If that’s not an adventure in missing the point, I don’t know what is.

It’s that time of the month again… As we head into those dog days of July, Mike would like to thank those who helped him get the toys he needs to enjoy his summer. Thanks to you, he bought a new bass boat, which we don’t need; a condo in Florida, where we don’t spend any time; and a $2,000 set of golf clubs…which he had been using as an alibi to cover the fact that he has been remorselessly banging his secretary, Beebee, for the last six months. Tragically, I didn’t suspect a thing. Right up until the moment Cherry Glick inadvertently delivered a lovely floral arrangement to our house, apparently intended to celebrate the anniversary of the first time Beebee provided Mike with her special brand of administrative support. Sadly, even after this damning evidence-and seeing Mike ram his tongue down Beebee’s throat-I didn’t quite grasp the depth of his deception. It took reading the contents of his secret e-mail account before I was convinced. I learned that cheap motel rooms have been christened. Office equipment has been sullied. And you should think twice before calling Mike’s work number during his lunch hour, because there’s a good chance that Beebee will be under his desk “assisting” him. I must confess that I was disappointed by Mike’s over-wrought prose, but I now understand why he insisted that I write this newsletter every month. I would say this is a case of those who can write, do; and those who can’t do Taxes. And since seeing is believing, I could have included a Hustler-ready pictorial layout of the photos of Mike’s work wife. However, I believe distributing these photos would be a felony. The camera work isn’t half-bad, though. It’s good to see that Mike has some skill in the bedroom, even if it’s just photography. And what does Beebee have to say for herself? Not Much. In fact, attempts to interview her for this issue were met with spaced-out indifference. I’ve had a hard time not blaming the conniving, store-bought-cleavage-baring Oompa Loompa-skinned adulteress for her part in the destruction of my marriage. But considering what she’s getting, Beebee has my sympathies. I blame Mike. I blame Mike for not honoring the vows he made to me. I blame Mike for not being strong enough to pass up the temptation of readily available extramarital sex. And I blame Mike for not being enough of a man to tell me he was having an affair, instead letting me find out via a misdirected floral delivery. I hope you have enjoyed this new digital version of the Terwilliger and Associates Newsletter. Next month’s newsletter will not be written by me as I will be divorcing Mike’s cheating ass. As soon as I press send on this e-mail, I’m hiring Sammy “the Shark” Shackleton. I don’t know why they call him “the Shark” but I did hear about a case where Sammy got a woman her soon-to-be ex-husband’s house, his car, his boat and his manhood in a mayonnaise jar. And one last thing, believe me when I say I will not be letting Mike off with “irreconcilable differences” in divorce court. Mike Terwilliger will own up to being the faithless, loveless, spineless, useless, dickless wonder he is.

Sometimes, when I’m bored, I can’t help but think what my life would be like if I hadn’t written the book. Monday, I would’ve played bridge. And tomorrow night, I’d be going to the League meeting and turning in the newsletter. Then on Friday night, Stuart would take me to dinner and we’d stay out late and I’d be tired when I got up for my tennis game on Saturday. Tired and content and . . . frustrated. Because Hilly would’ve called her maid a thief that afternoon, and I would’ve just sat there and listened to it. And Elizabeth would’ve grabbed her child’s arm too hard and I would’ve looked away, like I didn’t see it. And I’d be engaged to Stuart and I wouldn’t wear short dresses, only short hair, or consider doing anything risky like write a book about colored housekeepers, too afraid he’d disapprove. And while I’d never lie and tell myself I actually changed the minds of people like Hilly and Elizabeth, at least I don’t have to pretend I agree with them anymore.

When you answer questions about your educational or work history, let your enthusiasm about different projects and situations come through (e.g., “It was so much more than I could have hoped for in an internship. I had the chance to actually write up the newsletter and work with a designer to put it together. I loved every minute of it.”).

most of the stories in the Boston News-Letter were simply copied from the London papers.

I write a bunch of form labels on the whiteboard, in a nonsensical order, along with a bunch of randomly sized input boxes. I include first name, last name, address, gender, city, state, email address, etc. Then I tell the interviewee that we’re designing a form to sign up for an email newsletter and to arrange them in the right order. Only people who ask me why I need the users’ gender, or physical address, or really, anything but their email address get a second interview. I won’t hire a designer who doesn’t ask why, and I won’t hire a designer whose desire to arrange boxes is more important than their desire to protect users’ data.

You may have had big-time plans in your life-major league dreams that haven't panned out. You were going to write a best-selling book, but the opportunities just haven't come along. Are you willing to write for your church newsletter?

Thank you so much for picking up Death’s Awakening. This is the first book in my Eternal Sorrows Trilogy, and I sincerely hope you enjoy it! If you do, I’d love for you to join my newsletter. I send out monthly updates about what I’m working on and what’s going on in my writing life.

like to see more of Vivian and Luca and maybe other Italian bachelors follow in Rafe’s footsteps, too. ;) I’d love to write a new romantic adventure for Rafe and Ari, too (but is that allowed for Kindle Worlds? Mm..).   Oh, and you can also write to me directly. I love hearing from readers. You can reach me via my website, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or you can also email me.   A list of my works (arranged according to reading order) can be found here and you can also visit my author page on Amazon for book links.   Lastly, for updates on my newest releases and exclusive excerpts for upcoming releases, please consider signing up for my newsletter.   Thank you!

But it was Aldo’s pen that became his most forceful tool. He started a newsletter for rangers called the Carson Pine Cone. Aldo used it to “scatter seeds of knowledge, encouragement, and enthusiasm.” Most of the Pine Cone’s articles, poems, jokes, editorials, and drawings were Aldo’s own. His readers soon realized that the forest animals were as important to him as the trees. His goal was to bring back the “flavor of the wilds.

If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” or Martin Luther King’s statement that “our scientific power has outgrown our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men,” or Malcolm’s “We can work together with all other leaders and organizations, in harmony and unity, to eliminate evil in our community.” The saying “It takes a whole village to raise a child” (which I had seen in a little newsletter identifying it as an African proverb) really caught on. After about a year organizations all over the country began using it, and Hillary Rodham Clinton recently adapted it for the title of her book. Jimmy also began writing a regular column for the newsletter, raising all sorts of questions, such as, “Why are we at war with one another.?” “How will we make a living?” “What Time is it in Detroit and the World?”1 Clementine’s deeply felt appeals, Jimmy’s challenging questions, and my inclusion of news of community-building activities all helped to create the image of SOSAD as not just another organization but the spearhead of a new movement.

Some years ago I saw a documentary on dying whose main theme was that people die as they lived. That was Jimmy. For five years, since he began undergoing operations for bladder cancer and even after his lung cancer was diagnosed, he continued the activities that he considered important, marching against crackhouses, campaigning against the demolition of the Ford Auditorium, organizing Detroit Summer, making speeches, and writing letters to the editor and articles for the SOSAD newsletter and Northwest Detroiter. In 1992 while he was undergoing the chemotherapy that cleared up his bladder cancer, he helped form the Coalition against Privatization and to Save Our City. The coalition was initiated by activist members of a few AFSCME locals who contacted Carl Edwards and Alice Jennings who in turn contacted us. Jimmy helped write the mission statement that gave the union activists a sense of themselves as not only city workers but citizens of the city and its communities. The coalition’s town meetings and demonstrations were instrumental in persuading the new mayor, Dennis Archer, to come out against privatization, using language from the coalition newsletter to explain his position. At the same time Jimmy was putting out the garbage, keeping our corner at Field and Goethe free of litter and rubbish, mopping the kitchen and bathroom floors, picking cranberries, and keeping up “his” path on Sutton. After he entered the hospice program, which usually means death within six months, and up to a few weeks before his death, Jimmy slowed down a bit, but he was still writing and speaking and organizing. He used to say that he wasn’t going to die until he got ready, and because he was so cheerful and so engaged it was easy to believe him. A few weeks after he went on oxygen we did three movement-building workshops at the SOSAD office for a group of Roger Barfield’s friends who were trying to form a community-action group following a protest demonstration at a neighborhood sandwich shop over the murder of one of their friends. With oxygen tubes in his nostrils and a portable oxygen tank by his side, Jimmy spoke for almost an hour on one of his favorite subjects, the need to “think dialectically, rather than biologically.” Recognizing that this was probably one of Jimmy’s last extended speeches, I had the session videotaped by Ron Scott. At the end of this workshop we asked participants to come to the next session prepared to grapple with three questions: What can we do to make our neighborhoods safe? How can we motivate people to transform? How can we create jobs?

Prayer is security, having a connection to God. ~ Andi Harris         * Did you enjoy these devotionals? Please take a moment to write a review on Amazon. Share the blessings.   *   Sign up for Kimberley’s free newsletter for regular updates and offers. I promise I won’t share your email address with anyone else. And just for signing up, I’ll send you the devotional, Where Family Meets Faith   *   Visit Kimberley Payne’s blog for weekly posts and other interesting stuff to encourage women.   *   Where else to find Kimberley online: Facebook Twitter *   If you like these devotionals, visit Under the Cover of Prayer blog for more of the same.

Richard Russell — the godfather of financial newsletter writers — has recently made a stunning assertion about the gold markets. The 91 year-old, who lived through the great depression and fought in World War II, is very gentle and humane in his writing. He is not given to bouts of sensationalism.

One of my cats was coughing and sneezing. She looked as if she had trouble breathing and took to hiding under a desk. Would she survive the night? Is it just a cold or something much worse like cat leukemia? The vet announced it only a virus – an answer to prayer.   On a four-hour hike with my mother, two aunts and my brother’s mother-in-law, the average age was 65. The terrain was full of obstacles with fallen trees, raspberry bush thorns, and slippery logs. We made the entire trip without incidence – an answer to prayer.   My daughter had fallen from the monkey bars and landed with an audible crack from her left arm. She cried and complained that she could not move her elbow. Hours (and a full set of x-rays) later showed that it was only a minor fracture – an answer to prayer.   If I were to start a journal, it would fill up rather quickly. I find God’s faithfulness inexhaustible. He is a caring, compassionate and concerned Father. How great is His faithfulness.       Prayer is security, having a connection to God. ~ Andi Harris         * Did you enjoy these devotionals? Please take a moment to write a review on Amazon. Share the blessings.   *   Sign up for Kimberley’s free newsletter for regular updates and offers. I promise I won’t share your email address with anyone else. And just for signing up, I’ll send you the devotional, Where Family Meets Faith   *   Visit Kimberley Payne’s blog for weekly posts and other interesting stuff to encourage women.   *   Where else to find Kimberley online: Facebook Twitter *   If you like these devotionals, visit Under the Cover of Prayer blog for more of the same.

write a brief column on your field of expertise, then offer it to newsletters devoted to that topic.

Come up with ten ideas you can write newsletters about.

Helen laid out our fall agenda: we’d conduct a survey, we’d lead “cottage groups” with church members about the search. We’d receive anti-oppression training and create a “packet.” As recording secretary, I’d write newsletter squibs to keep the congregation informed of our progress. Clearly, my vision of the search committee as a series of intense theological discussions was a chimera!

One way I’ve managed to keep up with everything on my plate is by coming in to the office really early almost every day, even when I don’t have those Saturday numbers to look over. Four-thirty wouldn’t be all that unusual a time for me to get started down at the office. That early morning time is tremendously valuable: it’s uninterrupted time when I think and plan and sort things out. I write my letters and my articles for Wal-Mart World, our company newsletter.

And the question running through my mind in all of this is, How on earth am I supposed to be able to manage a website, run a bimonthly newsletter, talk daily on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter, and still have time to actually write books? What are these insane expectations?

minutes to write a quick and honest review on Amazon. I read every review personally, and I use the feedback to make improvements to the book in future editions. If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to my newsletter at Endalldisease.com, where you’ll receive all the latest books and articles that I publish, as well as three free eBooks just for signing up.

Here’s the trick to significantly improving your SaaS email marketing skills—you have to become a student of it. This means you should: Start collecting great email copy, CTAs, and designs. Understand the objective behind each and every email that businesses send. Try to understand the rationale behind copy, link, and design decisions. There are great websites like Really Good Emails11, Good Email Copy12, and Good Sales Emails.com13 that you can use for your research. These sites categorize email copy and designs by types. As well as this, you should sign up to receive emails from some of the leading SaaS brands. Those include, among others: Drift MailChimp Pipedrive Shopify SurveyMonkey Trello Wistia Zapier You should also sign up to competing products and mailing lists from companies in your sector. I personally signed up to thousands of products and newsletters. It’s great for benchmarking and research. At the time of writing, I’ve already passively collected more than 60,000 emails. Obviously, don’t sign up to your competitors’ products with a business email address! I have a special email address I use for this. This account allows me to get data, understand what other organizations are doing, and find good copy ideas. For example, here’s what a search for ‘Typeform’ gives me: Figure 18.1 – Inbox Inspiration It’s not uncommon for me to sign up several times to the same product or newsletter. This allows me to see what they have learned and to track the evolution of their email marketing program. At LANDR, we created a shared document to keep track of subject lines, offers, and copy we wanted to test. Our copywriter was even going through his junk mail folder to find ideas and inspiration. There are tests we ran that were inspired by copy found in his spam folder. Some of them turned out to be really successful too—so keep your eyes open for inspiration. You can use Evernote, Paper, or any other platform to collaborate on idea generation. Alternatively, you can subscribe to paid services like Mailcharts14 or Mailody15. These services will help you track and understand your competitors’ email programs. Build processes to find and access copy and design ideas. It will help you create better emails, faster. In the next chapter we’ll get started creating our first email sequences.

What’s your unique angle in thirty seconds or less?” In other words, why would anyone care to read his newsletter? I know that sounds harsh, but that’s the first question you have to answer before you put yourself into the public sphere. Pressed into defining his unique angle, Ben paused. He rumpled his face up, laughed nervously, and shrugged. This is hard! Finally he spoke, slowly, and then with confidence. Listen to how Ben defined his angle, his sauce: “I’ve been a performance coach for the last fourteen years, working with the best athletes in the world. Helping people perform better is my groove. I want to help anybody who wants to have a great day and shift them into the mentality to dominate their life. I have information to share when it comes to dealing with the best.” That is beautiful! Both in its heartfelt honesty and authenticity, but also in its clarity. Let’s pick it apart and look at what he did in those four sentences: He defines who he is, Why you should trust him, What he is passionate about, and What unique thing this prepares him to do for you. It is clear, approachable, direct, and short. The first three sentences define what makes him special (fourteen years helping the best athletes in the world perform better!), and the fourth (how he’s solving his customers’ problems, teaching mindsets needed to dominate life) defines the kind of love and attention he’ll generously dispense to cultivate a community. Take a minute, and as Ben has done, write out a pitch in your journal describing your special sauce. CHALLENGE Write out your unique angle. There are no right answers here. You can change these any time you’d like. Who are you? Why should people listen? What are you passionate about? What will you do for people?

By summer’s end, there were more black than white communists in Birmingham, a situation that infuriated Magic City officials. Everyone knew that the Reds practiced social and racial equality in their ranks, and Hiram Evans, the Klan’s Imperial Wizard, writing in his Kourier newsletter, maintained that they were “dangling before the ignorant lustful and brutish negroes . . . a tempting bait . . . that negro men should take white women and live with them, declaring this is their God-given right under a communist regime.” Several Birmingham Klansmen became so incensed after reading Evans’s editorial that they burned Tom Johnson in effigy.13

The Tesla Flying Saucer Bill Jones, writing for The UFO Enigma, the newsletter for the UFO Study Group of greater St. Louis,

WHEN I GOT TO HIGH SCHOOL, A MINISTER ASKED if I wanted to write an article for a church newsletter. When he asked, it felt like somebody had finally noticed me and wondered if there was something going on in my invisible world. I doubt that’s exactly what he was doing, but that’s the way it felt to me. I spent a solid week on the article, all of four hundred words, no more than a few paragraphs. I gave it to the minister and he called and said it was good, that I was a good writer and smart. I still remember how I felt when he said the word smart. I felt a little drunk. Kind of disoriented. A pleasure chemical seeped into my brain and, without me knowing it, I’d become Pavlov’s dog. If I was smart it meant I mattered. So I wanted to be smart. When the article came out, people stopped me in the halls to say they enjoyed reading it. My mother told me she had friends calling to say they liked the article too. And that was all I needed. I had a costume and it felt great to wear it. I could be smart. I could write, and if I wrote I mattered. So for the first time I started reading books. And I kept writing. I heard a speaker quote a poem so I went home and started memorizing poems. I wrote more than a thousand poems over the next two years. And I started dreaming about writing a book. Today, when people ask why I became a writer I try to answer honestly. I’m a writer because, at an early age, I became convinced it was the one thing I could do to earn people’s respect. It’s true in the process I learned to love words and ideas and these days I actually like to get lost in the writing process. But the early fuel, the early motivation, was all about becoming a person worth loving.

Get started by using a service like Catalog Choice, which eliminates most unwanted mailings. Usually it’ll take a month or so for the various companies to follow through on your request. Then you can use the following steps to make sure you’re completely off these unwanted lists: Go to DMACHOICE.org to get rid of unwanted magazines and newsletters. Go to OptOutPrescreen.com (US only) to get rid of unwanted credit card offers. Write to the mail preference service (for the US or the UK) to opt out your name from the major mailing list.

A newsletter’s job is to build attention and habit.

One thing more makes these men and women from the age of wigs, swords, and stagecoaches seem surprisingly contemporary. This small group of people not only helped to end one of the worst of human injustices in the most powerful empire of its time; they also forged virtually every important tool used by citizens’ movements in democratic countries today. Think of what you’re likely to find in your mailbox—or electronic mailbox—over a month or two. An invitation to join the local chapter of a national environmental group. If you say yes, a logo to put on your car bumper. A flier asking you to boycott California grapes or Guatemalan coffee. A poster to put in your window promoting this campaign. A notice that a prominent social activist will be reading from her new book at your local bookstore. A plea that you write your representative in Congress or Parliament, to vote for that Guatemalan coffee boycott bill. A “report card” on how your legislators have voted on these and similar issues. A newsletter from the group organizing support for the grape pickers or the coffee workers. Each of these tools, from the poster to the political book tour, from the consumer boycott to investigative reporting designed to stir people to action, is part of what we take for granted in a democracy. Two and a half centuries ago, few people assumed this. When we wield any of these tools today, we are using techniques devised or perfected by the campaign that held its first meeting at 2 George Yard in 1787. From their successful crusade we still have much to learn. If, early that year, you had stood on a London street corner and insisted that slavery was morally wrong and should be stopped, nine out of ten listeners would have laughed you off as a crackpot. The tenth might have agreed with you in principle, but assured you that ending slavery was wildly impractical: the British Empire’s economy would collapse. The parliamentarian Edmund Burke, for example, opposed slavery but thought that the prospect of ending even just the Atlantic slave trade was “chimerical.” Within a few short years, however, the issue of slavery had moved to center stage in British political life. There was an abolition committee in every major city or town in touch with a central committee in London. More than 300,000 Britons were refusing to eat slave-grown sugar. Parliament was flooded with far more signatures on abolition petitions than it had ever received on any other subject. And in 1792, the House of Commons passed the first law banning the slave trade. For reasons we will see, a ban did not take effect for some years to come, and British slaves were not finally freed until long after that. But there was no mistaking something crucial: in an astonishingly short period of time, public opinion in Europe’s most powerful nation had undergone a sea change. From this unexpected transformation there would be no going back.

Building a relationship with my readers is the very best thing about writing. I occasionally send newsletters with details on new releases, special offers and other bits of news relating to my Mystery novels.   And if you sign up to the mailing list, I'll send you all

On October 26, 2016—less than two weeks to election day—travel writer Zach Everson covered the ribbon cutting at the Trump International Hotel in the Old Post Office building in Washington, DC, just a few blocks from the White House. Everson frequently covered hotel openings, which often featured lavish food spreads and “the owners sipping champagne with a few travel writers.” But this one was different. A horde of political reporters trailed Donald and Ivanka Trump as they toured the hotel. “The political reporters were amazed they had complimentary pastries,” Everson said in an interview. 1 A couple months later, Everson got an assignment from Condé Nast Traveller to cover the growing political and social scene at the hotel. In the course of researching that story, Everson booked a night at the hotel. One of his fellow guests told Everson he was about to leave for a restaurant outside the hotel, when he noticed workers polishing the banisters and the manager nervously pacing. The guest concluded, correctly, that the president was on his way, cancelled his outside reservation, and ate at the hotel instead. To track presidential comings and goings for his story, Everson started monitoring social media feeds. And he noticed something: not even a year into Trump’s presidency, the hotel had become a unique locale in Washington. “It became like Melville’s white whale,” Everson said. “If you want it to be your opportunity and a place for you to go and rub elbows with the President, it’s that. If you’re a lobbyist or a businessman or a foreign leader and want to portray you are close to the president, it’s that too. It’s everything you hate or love about Donald Trump.” Everson quit travel writing to cover, full time, the Trump International Hotel. He began publishing a newsletter, 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue. He had plenty of material.

If you want to write, make art, start a band, bake? Things that don’t seem like a big deal until you sit down and suddenly feel intimidated? You’ll be fine. The only person putting pressure on you is you. Why would starting a newsletter or baking a cake or learning “Wonderwall” on guitar be anything other than a thing you tried? Last year, I tried to make something I saw on The Great British Baking Show, and I used too much butter and the oven caught on fire and smoke was pouring out of the stove and I had to call my dad, who put baking soda in the oven. And now I’m telling you about it here, so look: it’s okay. Pick up the guitar and learn the fucking chords. Just don’t bust it out in the middle of a party, or I will call the police.

That is how the critique of Doug Henwood, David Graeber and others can be understood. ‘The major frustration of the book is political’, writes Henwood, publisher of the American newsletter Left Business Observer and author of Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom.32 Piketty does not deal with the question of which political forces affect inequality and the wage ratio. Piketty ignores ‘the most obvious’ reason for the lower capital–income ratio, according to Graeber.

Digital subscriptions are transforming the broader publishing industry in profound ways, and a new breed of reader-supported titles are enjoying newfound popularity. In the technology industry, for example, Jessica Lessin’s sharp, pointed (and subscription-only) The Information now has the second-largest team of tech reporters in Silicon Valley. Ben Thompson has thousands of readers who are happy to pay him $100 a year for his excellent Stratechery newsletter, and Bill Bishop writes an email newsletter about current affairs in China called Sinocism that has more than thirty thousand readers paying $118 a year. Meanwhile, all sorts of splashy, venture-funded, “digitally native” titles like BuzzFeed, Mashable, The Daily Beast, and Vice are struggling to hit their numbers. Any guesses why?

Assign a file or paper tray to collect single-side printed paper for reuse. Boycott paper sourced from virgin forests and reams sold in plastic. Cancel magazine and newspaper subscriptions; view them online instead. Digitize important receipts and documents for safekeeping. Digital files are valid proofs for tax purposes. Download CutePDF Writer to save online files without having to print them. Email invitations or greeting cards instead of printing them (see “Holidays and Gifts” chapter). Forage the recycling can when paper scraps are needed, such as for bookmarks or pictures (for school collages, for example). Give extra paper to the local preschool. Hack the page margins of documents to maximize printing. Imagine a paperless world. Join the growing paperless community. Kill the fax machine; encourage electronic faxing through a service such as HelloFax. Limit yourself to print only on paper that has already been printed on one side. Make online billing and banking a common practice. Nag the kids’ teachers to send home only important papers. Opt out of paper newsletters. Print on both sides when using a new sheet of paper (duplex printing). Question the need for printing; print only when absolutely necessary. In most cases, it is not. Repurpose junk mail envelopes—make sure to cross out any barcode. Sign electronically using the Adobe Acrobat signing feature or SignNow.com. Turn down business cards; enter relevant info directly into a smartphone. Use shredded paper as a packing material, single-printed paper fastened with a metal clip for a quick notepad (grocery lists, errands lists), and double-printed paper to wrap presents or pick up your dog’s feces. Visit the local library to read business magazines and books. Write on paper using a pencil, which you can then erase to reuse paper, or better yet, use your computer, cell phone, or erasable board instead of paper. XYZ: eXamine Your Zipper; i.e., your leaks: attack any incoming source of paper.

A platform is a raised, level surface on which people or things can stand. A platform business works in just that way: it allows users—producers and consumers of goods, services, and content— to create, communicate, and consume value through the platform. Amazon, Apple’s App Store, eBay, Airbnb, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pay- Pal, YouTube, Uber, Wikipedia, Instagram, etsy, Twitter, Snapchat, Hotel Tonight, Salesforce, Kickstarter, and Alibaba are all platform businesses. While these businesses have done many impressive things, the most relevant to us is that they have created an oppor- tunity for anyone, even those with limited means, to share their thoughts, ideas, creativity, and creations with millions of people at a low cost. Today, if you create a product or have an idea, you can sell that product or share that idea with a substantial audience quickly and cost-effectively through these platforms. Not only that, but the platforms arguably give more power to individuals than corporations since they’re so efficient at identifying ulterior motives or lack of authenticity. The communities on these platforms, many of whom are millennials, know when they’re being sold to rather than shared with, and quickly eliminate those users from their con- sciousness (a/k/a their social media feeds). Now, smaller organizations and less prosperous individuals are able to sell to or share their products, services, or content with more targeted demographics of people. That’s exactly what the modern consumer desires: a more personalized, connected experience. For example, a Brooklyn handbag designer can sell her handbags to a select group of customers through one of the multitude of fashion or shopping platforms and create an ongoing dialogue with her audience through a communication platform such as Instagram. Or an independent filmmaker from Los Angeles can create a short film using a GoPro and the editing software on their Mac and then instantly share it with countless people through one of a dozen video platforms and get direct feedback. Or an author can write a book and sell it directly from his or her website and social channels to anyone who’s excited about it. The reaction to standardization and globalization has been enabled by these platforms. Customers can get what they want, from whomever they want, whenever they want it. It’s a revised and personalized version of globalization that allows us to maintain and enhance the cultural connections that create the meaning we crave in our lives.

Diana was on a conference call with the chairman of the board of an international professional association. She listened as he listed problem after problem: staff members are critical of each other and of members; there is little collaboration among staff and board members; no one is willing to go the extra mile; everyone complains about the cost of membership; members seldom volunteer to serve on committees or to write articles for the newsletter. The list of problems went on and on. Diana gently interrupted the habitual tirade: Diana: May I share my reflections and ask a question? Peter: Yes. Diana: I hear that you are very frustrated and feeling somewhat overwhelmed with all the problems people bring to you. Peter: Yes. Diana: I wonder what it is that you really want. You have described in detail what you do not want—all the problems. I am curious, what do you want for the association, its members, and the board and the staff? Peter: That is quite easy. I would like more members who are actively engaged. Diana: That is a clear and exciting image for the future. I suggest that you begin an inquiry into “Engaged Membership.” Ask members of the board, the staff, and the association to share stories of when they have been highly engaged as members of the association and/or as members of another organization, team, or community. Ask them who or what led them to be so engaged. What did they do and contribute? How did leadership encourage and support their engagement? How did it feel? What were the benefits to them and to others? What ideas do they have to enhance engaged membership in the association? Peter: That is a very different approach. Diana: Yes, when you flip problems and ask about what you really want, two things happen. One, people learn what it is that you stand for as a leader. They learn what you expect of them. In your case it is “Engaged Membership.” And two, you get more of want you want. When people know what is wanted and expected for success, they do it.