A special post from AJLI‘s Laurie Dodge, Marketing and Communications Director

48 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute*
YouTube is the second largest search engine*
70% of branded content is created by consumers*
The average user of Facebook creates 90 pieces of content per month*
57% of people communicate more online than off* (really????)
This past Monday I had the good fortune to attend the Social Media For Nonprofits conference in New York City, organized by Darian Rodriguez Heyman and Ritu Sharma. In 2012 the series has been scheduled to visit San Francisco; …

Webinar Wednesdays gets into gear, Wednesday, Oct. 5, with insights from Heather McLeod Grant, co-author of Forces for Good
The Webinar Wednesdays program, one of the exciting offerings in AJLI’s robust new membership-wide online learning initiative, gets into gear Wednesday, October 5, with a featured presentation by Heather McLeod Grant, senior consultant at the Monitor Institute and co-author of Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits.
Grant, who possess an in-depth knowledge of the AJLI organization and membership as a result of having helped guide the organization through its Strategic …

THE RUBBER HITS THE ROAD

Those of you who attended Annual Conference may recall the presentation given by AJLI’s Executive Director Susan Danish in which she read aloud a children’s story about a caterpillar
contemplating a metamorphosis into a butterfly.
The message was simple: the caterpillar could not expect to thrive in the world around her unless she took the brave leap into becoming a butterfly—a full-fledged being, admired for its beauty and grace, and capable of fulfilling all of its dreams. That story was a fitting metaphor for the transformation The Junior …

We asked Anne Dalton, AJLI’s Chief Officer for Strategic Initiatives, and Janine le Sueur, Director of Education and Programs, to give us a little primer on Action Learning as a concept and how it made its way into AJLI’s transformation process.
 
What is Action Learning?
Action Learning is a fluid, dynamic, and open-ended way of collaborating for success. Through questions and reflective inquiry in place of “expert” information, Action Learning team members engage in a dynamic process of developing and implementing solutions to complex and urgent problems where no known solutions exist.
Why …

It’s still a new idea for many Junior Leagues, but more are now using their own blogs as an additional communications channel to reach members and their communities.
And why not? Blogs are easy and inexpensive to start up with online website software like WordPress, easy to maintain (if you keep up with it!), and sure to impress.
Do Junior Leagues need a blog? That’s really up to them. On the plus side, blogs give you a home for member-focused content so you don’t have to clog up your website. They complement …

The Junior League of Napa-Sonoma sent out that Tweet at a little after 1:30 p.m. PDT on August 17.
Within minutes, retweets started coming in from all over The Association. The answers to that question tell us a lot about today’s League – and today’s League members.
Below we’ve captured the Twitter thread in its entirety just for our readers.

[View the story "Why Did You Join The Junior League?" on Storify]

While back-to-school backpack programs remain one of the most popular Junior League programs, the Junior League of Bryan-College Station’s Stuff the Bus initiative creates a new wrinkle: fund-raising by flash mob.
JLBCS’ signature project – which aims to provide school supplies to over 16,000 students in Bryan-College Station – used the very latest in social media attention-getting tools this year with a community call to dance in public in front of Bryan’s Brazos Center.
You can see the results below, or here, in KBTX TV’s live coverage of the nearly 200 flash …

Sometimes we lose sight of it in day-to-day League activities, but many Junior Leagues and individual League members have made important contributions, both large and small, to American history over the last 110 years.
Recognizing that, AJLI will tweet highlights of some of those achievements, one a day, during Women’s History Month 2011.
As you can see, the list is long and impressive.  Please feel free to retweet any of these, particularly those that involved your own League!

Before becoming the first woman to join the US Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor served …

In 1901, 86 years before Congress formalized Women’s History Month and 19 years before American women were given the right to vote, a young New York socialite named Mary Harriman had an idea unusual for her class and time: that women had an important role to play as civic leaders.  The result was the start of an all-women volunteer organization called The Junior League, now with more than 155,000 members in 292 independent Leagues in the U.S., Canada, the UK and Mexico.
Says Delly Beekman, President of The Association of Junior Leagues International, Inc., “Mary Harriman is an amazing …

When Executive Director Susan Danish arrived at AJLI in 2003, she brought with her more than 20 years of marketing and management experience in both the business and nonprofit sectors, having worked on behalf of such mega-brands, retailers, and thought leaders as Christie’s, Calvin Klein,  Clairol, Express, Procter & Gamble, and The Center for Women’s Leadership at Babson College.

As AJLI’s Executive Director you wear a lot of hats. How do you balance your responsibility as steward and visionary with your duties in hands-on, day-to-day management?
It really is a balancing …