A few weeks ago, hundreds of customers came down to San Diego for ACTIVE World, our customer conference. One of the keynote speakers, Tim Sanders, is the CEO of Net Minds and founder of research firm, Deeper Media Incorporated. Tim is also the author of four books and works to improve the intersection between technology and people.
Tim talked about creating an experience around your product or service and used two stories:
1. Less stuff, fewer steps – Steve Jobs Continue reading
Yuppies. Say what you want about them, but they have incomes and a general affinity for the hottest fitness trend, class, and activity. They also take to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram before, during and after participating in a cool activity. Doesn’t that sound like an ideal customer? Depending on the demographics of your community, you could tap into the young professional market with some new and trendy offerings.
To help you understand what young professionals are looking for, here is a list of activities that are currently trendy in the 20 – 30 year old range: Continue reading
From April 7th to April 13th, we’ll all be engrossed in National Boys & Girls Club Week whether we know it or not. Boys & Girls Clubs of America will open doors to 4,000 clubs around the country to show the community how “great futures” begin right there. Continue reading
At the end of January, IPRA (Illinois Park and Recreation Association) hosted its annual conference in Chicago. The ‘Soaring to New Heights’ Conference brought together over 4,000 P&R professionals, elected officials, students, and vendors for a tradeshow, workshops, meetings and more. A few of us from ACTIVE headed out for the three-day conference, and saw some trends taking place.
Here are some of our favorite topics that were bouncing around at IRPA 2013: Continue reading
This is the second part of a guest post series from Curt Jackson. Click here to read the first five unconventional adult programs to offer.
6. Read Bedtime Stories Like a Pro – Voice over acting is a profession that you may not think about until you watch car commercials or cartoons. But acting with our voices is something most of us do daily. By using inflection, accents, different tones and pitches we tell stories and jokes to our peers. Find a voice acting coach to teach parents how to put some pizazz into reading bedtime stories. Continue reading
Most parks and recreation departments offer the same adult classes – yoga, bridge, photography, creative writing, dog training, blah blah blah. These are great to have because they are popular, but isn’t time to stand out and offer truly unique classes as well?
In every city there are possible contract instructors looking for opportunities to teach others, whether they know it or not. Sometimes they find you and other times you have to look for them. However, you can’t look for contract instructors until you know what programs you want to offer. Here are 5 unique programs I’m fairly sure you’re not offering but, depending on your clientele, could be crowd-pleasers: Continue reading
By this point, you know all about the post-Thanksgiving lineup: Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday. Basically, every sales outlet from big business to small business and the internet has staked its claim on a day in late November in order to promote sales with discounts. But have you heard about the newest addition, the inaugural GivingTuesday? As you can imagine, it’s a day dedicated to giving rather than shopping. Continue reading
All types of recreation organizations have been doing more with less over the last few years. That trend will continue as budgets remain tight, but service expectations continue to rise. One way to save time and money is with technology, specifically software that can help automate back-office tasks. But organizations have many options when it comes to software ranging from solutions they host themselves to ones hosted by the provider (in the cloud). Today, we’ll break down the latter and why it makes sense in this economy: Continue reading
No matter what profession you are in, it’s important to keep up with trends, news, and ideas. If you’re a social media person, that’s easy with blogs like Mashable and Social Media Today. But it’s a bit harder for campus recreation professionals. So today, we’ll cover five resources that can help you stay on top of the industry (note: we’ll lean heavily on NIRSA). Here they are: Continue reading
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