Environmental Scanning for Associations: The Everyday Guide to Capturing, Analyzing, and Interpreting Strategic Information

Environmental scanning is more than reading news sources and writing reports about the activity, and it's more than an exercise undertaken leading up to a strategic-planning session. Done well, environmental scanning--the monitoring, interpreting, and acting on trends and conditions affecting your industry, profession, and association--draws a community into a thoughtful and ongoing discussion about how the environment is changing and what that means for the future. The value, point out the authors of Environmental Scanning for Associations lies in a collaborative sense-making of the conditions in which an organization operates. Good environmental scanning becomes a basis for strategic action.

This book takes into account the organizational nature and unique conditions of associations and

• Lays out a framework that explains the basic elements of a scanning process for associations
• Explains the fundamental concepts that are critical to success when establishing a scanning process
• Provides illustrations and scanning reference tools from associations

Whether you are just beginning an environmental-scanning effort or you want pointers for improving your current activities, this guide is designed to help.