our focus: creating meaningful and diverse opportunities that allow members to connect with each other. Every Time.
2024 GSAE Leadership Retreat, September 9-10
Thirty-six GSAE leaders gathered at The Classic Center in Athens, GA for a retreat facilitated by Dr. Damian Kavanagh, CAE. Participants were placed in teams to compete in a “Lost at Sea” session followed by small group work framed by GSAE’s Core Values and to address one of GSAE’s five tenets:
- Expanding your network
- Building new skills
- Solving today’s problems
- Learning by leading
- Advancing your career
Three big ideas for consideration
- Phone a Friend – Motley Crew and Koalas (Building new skills)
- Leveraging AI – (Advancing your career / Solving today’s problems)
- Visionary Vanguard of Mentorship – (Learning by leading / Expanding your network)
The participants also received two hours of continuing education including exploring current and future trends in the labor market from Kathryn Lookofsky, MPA, Regional Coordinator, Athens, Office of Workforce Development, Community Marketing Tips from Ruby Riesinger, District Director, Small Business Development Center, University of Georgia, and an outline of SBDC’s resources and programs from David Canady.
Thank you to our hosts and sponsors:
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| The Classic Center |
Visit Athens GA |
Levy |
Hotel Indigo Downtown |
expanding your network
- Create interactive introductions
- Mix it up (live, videos, warm-ups, etc.)
- Make it personal
- Create casual connections
- Empower our membership to create organic opportunities to gather and share
- Utilize storytelling – promotion, engagement
- Increase ease of information-sharing – internally and externally
- Provide networking opportunities
- Facilitate connections
- Build into everything
- Smaller is better in this environment
- Re-launch the Hyper-local framework
building new skills
- Format and Structure
- Flexible programming times – pilot breakfasts, luncheons and happy hours
- Build in pre/post time for both “flipping the classroom” and reflecting on/implementing the information shared
- Breakouts should always include strategies to turn information into knowledge and action
- Solution-focused
- Encourage opportunities to form serendipitous pods/cohorts among members
solving today’s problems
- Ask what’s working continuously
- Create feedback loops from members to leaders to staff
- Adjust and evolve
- Education
- Utilize our member experts and existing collaborative partnerships
- Seek out other partnerships with corporate supplier members
learning by leading
- Share our results every time we pilot a new idea throughout our communication vehicles
- White papers, lists
- Slides and videos available intact and edited into bite-sized consumption
- GSAEtv and its next iteration
- DOPE – Develop Once, Publish Everywhere
advancing your career
- Harness the energy of our brand evangelists and our learning experts
- Encourage interactive exchanges within each program
- Incorporate physical movement where possible
- Entertainment is okay!
Tactics Captured and Worth Pursuing
- Formal process to follow-up with guests and visitors with membership information – begun November 2022
- Re-print the corporate supplier bring a guest postcards – printed and distributed at all fall events
- Institutionalize contacting all renewing CAEs with options, instructions – Winter and Fall every year
- Also, revamped CAE page on website to focus on renewals too
- Increased support for SIGS – annual orientation in February
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