Designing Your Future: Key Trends, Challenges, and Choices Facing Association and Nonprofit Leaders

Some organizations have a clear sense of how they will shape their future, but many do not. Most are at the start of a new era, with uncertainty about the future being the only thing they count on. How does your organization scan the external environment to identify key trends, issues, and developments that could be of relevance? How do you, as an association or nonprofit leader, use future-focused information to drive future thinking,strategy development, and innovation within your organization and at the board levels?Keeping abreast of current events is one thing; viewing trends through the lens of implications and action plans for your organization is another. That's where Designing Your Future can serve as a valuable resource. Identifying and analyzing trends, issues, and events that are likely to cause transformational change within the association and nonprofit sector are critical undertakings if organizations are to pinpoint and execute their options and opportunities for sustainability, growth, and responsive strategies. Designing Your Future: Key Trends, Challenges, and Choices Facing Association and Nonprofit Leaders is a milestone in ASAE & The Center's Association of the Future research program. It is the first release in a series of planned resources to provide associations with perspectives on the future global environment, including competitive and market issues to formulate plans to capture opportunities rather than react to threats.Thinking through the implications of the environment that is continually evolving around your organization is not a one-time exercise. It is a continual process of reflection and action. Designing Your Future began with the analysis of several hundred trends. Association leaders and other experts and practitioners have winnowed the lengthy list of impacts to the most critical trends ranging from social to economic to political to environmental to technological impacts likely to affect associations. Use Designing Your Future and subsequent resources to prepare yourself, your board, and your staff to anticipate and plan for the realities of the world in which we all work.