Here's some sweet open strategic thinking.

Check out this awesome post from the Social Media Club. Three SMC interim board members (I believe) were asked to brianstorm about membership issues.

1. How do we increase new membership of Social Media Club
2. How do we increase engagement and generate excitement for existing members?
3. How do we localize SMC chapters on areas with few members and a lot of miles in between?

Sound familiar? Yeah. The SMC is obviously a group of people with more than a passing interest in social media, but these questions about membership could be those of ANY association.

They then go on to describe the ideas they come up with in relation to their three target questions, but those ideas (a lot of which could be useful for associations in general) is not actually what made me take notice. The killer point here is that they then posted this on the blog, inviting comments and collaboration. You can safely assume there will be follow-up posts, as they tighten their thoughts and mesh them in with whatever the other board members might be working on.

This is exactly how to enable strategic thinking throughout an organization. Maybe it's not something you do openly with the public. Maybe it's not something you do openly with your members! You start where you can start, even if it's just internally with staff. You don't force anyone to participate, but you have the information there and accessible, and you allow those who want to to have some input.

Awesome.