Photo Sharing Made Simple

Todays smartphones make it easier and easier to take and share photos. Other social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have made it easy to share photos with your friends. Well I came across a relatively new application that allows the sharing of photos by friends into a single photo album. Now all your friends or association members could share their photos of a specific event in real time all in the same photo album. No worrying about collecting photos from multiple people to create the album. Create the album, invite, and share in real time. If this is of interest, check out www.liveshare.com. The smartphone free app works for iPhone, Android, WP7, and you can always access and share simply from the web. Try it with your next event, you'll probably get those event angles typically not seen by your usual event photographers.

True Randomness for Your Organization

More and more every day we see organizations that offer a drawing or prizes by doing simple things such as a "like" on the organizations Facebook page. So how do organizations pick winners like this and keep it all completely random. If you are looking for a great tool that enables you to do this, look no further than www.random.org.

Their website gives a little insight into what random generated randomness really is...

Perhaps you have wondered how predictable machines like computers can generate randomness. In reality, most random numbers used in computer programs are pseudo-random, which means they are a generated in a predictable fashion using a mathematical formula. This is fine for many purposes, but it may not be random in the way you expect if you're used to dice rolls and lottery drawings.

RANDOM.ORG offers true random numbers to anyone on the Internet. The randomness comes from atmospheric noise, which for many purposes is better than the pseudo-random number algorithms typically used in computer programs. People use RANDOM.ORG for holding drawings, lotteries and sweepstakes, to drive games and gambling sites, for scientific applications and for art and music. The service has existed since 1998 and was built and is being operated by Mads Haahr of the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College, Dublin in Ireland.

Random.org offers both FREE and paid services depending on what you are looking for. Services range from lottery picks, to dice rollers, to coin flippers, to sequence generators to random geographic coordinate generation. Go to their website now and check it out.

RANDOM.org

Understanding Your Hard & Soft Benefits

I thought I would share a quick idea i received from the ASAE 199 Ideas...

Hard benefits are things like education, publications, and legislative representation. Soft benefits, or “affinity programs,” offer a personal perk such as a hotel room discount or low-interest credit card. A prospective member generally doesn’t make the decision to join an association based on the desirability of its affinity programs unless they’re unavailable (or not as affordable) somewhere else. Still, while a prospect may not become a member simply to gain access to, say, car rental or credit card discounts, once people do join, they may be more satisfied members because of the affinity programs.

Perhaps we should all evaluate our organizations benefits and ask ourselves if we are trying to get members to join because of "soft" benefits.