Education committees often operate under tight time and resource constraints while facing external pressure to produce high-quality events and impactful learning outcomes. In this highly interactive workshop, you will gain techniques for organizing engaging and productive planning meetings that lead to more innovative and energizing conferences.

you'll leave with tools for

• Building trust, safety, and camaraderie within the committee and volunteers to maximize engagement and diverse perspectives
• Fostering greater accountability among committee members
• Encouraging creativity and innovative thinking around experience design

agenda

• 11:45 AM — Optional networking (15 min)
• 12:00 PM — Intro (5 min)
• 12:05 PM — Interactive learning and facilitation (45 min)
• 12:50 PM — Creative thinking exercises (7 min)
• 12:57 PM — Conclusion / job sharing (3 min)
• 1:00 PM — Post-event networking (15 min)

presenters

Alex Suchman, Facilitator · Pam Rosenberg, Moderator

Target audience: Education managers, education senior managers, education directors

For decades, the standard operating procedure for staff has been to "save everything" — from 12-year-old emails to outdated meeting planner contacts. In today's landscape of evolving privacy regulations, AI tools, and cybersecurity threats, digital hoarding is a major organizational liability. This session explores the tension between risk management and user experience, offering practical change-management strategies to confidently purge historical data, and equips executives to evaluate their tech investments and partner with IT leaders on forward-thinking, three-to-five-year technology plans.

speakers

• Ryan Hietpas, Speaker
• Ben Kalkawrf, Speaker
• Kevin Menzer, Speaker

key details

• Objective: Identify data risks — legal and financial vulnerabilities of retaining unnecessary historical data (discoverability, subpoenas, breaches)
• Objective: Drive cultural change — "soft pitch" and change-management strategies for letting go of outdated information without panic
• Objective: Navigate the AI frontier — frameworks for acceptable-use policies on AI meeting bots, recordings, and automated transcription
• Objective: Elevate IT leadership — the right questions to ask IT directors, shifting IT from a cost center to a strategic force multiplier

This session will explore how boards and committees can balance efficiency with thoughtful governance by understanding when decisions should move quickly and when they require deeper deliberation. Using interactive scenarios and practical governance tools such as the Governance Decision Matrix and Governance Filter, participants will learn how to align decision-making with risk, strategic importance, mission impact, financial implications, and member consequences. The discussion will also address common governance pitfalls, effective board meeting practices, and strategies for developing board members who can successfully distinguish governance from operations.

Walk the floor of ASAE and you will meet hundreds of representatives selling numerous products that hook right into your AMS flawlessly! How often is that as painless as it seems? Does the resulting automation justify the cost? What are you risking by letting a third-party into your AMS?

Webinar Goal

Help association leaders evaluate whether their AMS and integration portfolio is delivering, and if additional integrations bring new value sufficient to justify they costs and risks.

Intended Audience

Association executives, membership operations leaders, IT stakeholders, finance leaders, data owners, and vendor-management teams whose organizations already maintain approximately 2-4 AMS integrations.

Agenda

• 12 p.m. - Welcome and assumptions: What integrations are already in the room, and what pain points are attendees trying to solve now?
• 12:05 p.m. - Value check: Are integrations still earning their keep? Where are current integrations creating measurable value through automation, reporting, member experience, revenue protection, or reduced manual work?
• 12:15 p.m. - The full cost of “already integrated”: What recurring costs have accumulated, including vendor fees, API limits, staff time, maintenance, support tickets, documentation, testing, and upgrade impacts?
• 12:25 p.m. - Risk spotlight: Security, privacy, and access control: How should teams reassess authentication, permissions, vendor access, data exposure, incident response, SSO, and compliance expectations after integrations are live?
• 12:38 p.m. - Risk spotlight: Data integrity and reliability: Where do duplicate records, field-mapping drift, sync failures, timing conflicts, reporting gaps, and unclear data ownership create operational risk?
• 12:50 p.m. - Governance: Keeping integrations manageable: What review cadence, ownership model, documentation, monitoring, and change-management practices keep integrations from becoming fragile or invisible?
• 12:57 p.m. - Wrap-up and next actions: Which integrations should attendees monitor, fix, renegotiate, retire, or expand after the session?

Tired of reading about AI? Come see it. A few of your fellow members are pulling back the curtain on real tools they've built — no code, no dev team, no budget beyond the monthly platform subscription. We'll show ours, you show yours (or just ask the questions in a safe space with others who are just as fascinated and terrified by this tsunami of tech wave). Informal, fast, actually useful.

We want to hear from you. Share your own AI experience.

Session Structure (~60 min)

• Welcome & framing (5 min) — Jemilah and Stephanie set expectations: casual, no wrong answers, everyone's learning together.
• Show & Tell Segments (40 min) — 3-4 demos, 8-10 min each. Each one follows the same simple arc:
  • Here's the problem I was solving
  • Here's what I built / used
  • Here's what surprised me

This conversation brings together women leaders to share the experiences, relationships, and organizational cultures that have influenced their careers, exploring both supportive environments and the challenges navigated along the way. Attendees will gain insights on leadership development, mentorship, sponsorship, workplace culture, and creating inclusive environments that support professional growth.

Moderator

Danielle Bauer, CAE, Executive Vice President, The Laundry Association

Panelists

• Gayle Irvin, Executive Director, ARN and VP Client Services, AMC
• Tiffany Swanigan, Managing Director, Lawyers Associated Worldwide
• Kate Dockins, Executive Director, American Student Dental Association
• Maricela Arias-Cantu, MS, MHA, CAE, Chief Executive Officer, Society for Public Health Education

Discussion Topics

• Career journeys and pathways to leadership
• Professional development, mentorship, and sponsorship
• Skills women need to succeed and continue advancing
• Navigating unwelcoming environments, implicit bias, and the glass ceiling
• Creating inclusive and psychologically safe workplaces
• The future of work and leadership in association management

This conversation brings together women leaders to share the experiences, relationships, and organizational cultures that have influenced their careers, exploring both supportive environments and the challenges navigated along the way. Attendees will gain insights on leadership development, mentorship, sponsorship, workplace culture, and creating inclusive environments that support professional growth.

Moderator

Danielle Bauer, CAE, Executive Vice President, The Laundry Association

Panelists

• Gayle Irvin, Executive Director, ARN and VP Client Services, AMC
• Tiffany Swanigan, Managing Director, Lawyers Associated Worldwide
• Kate Dockins, Executive Director, American Student Dental Association
• Maricela Arias-Cantu, MS, MHA, CAE, Chief Executive Officer, Society for Public Health Education

Discussion Topics

• Career journeys and pathways to leadership
• Professional development, mentorship, and sponsorship
• Skills women need to succeed and continue advancing
• Navigating unwelcoming environments, implicit bias, and the glass ceiling
• Creating inclusive and psychologically safe workplaces
• The future of work and leadership in association management