Guest post by Arianna Rehak.

Editor’s disclosure: I’m speaking at Surge with Susan Cato of ASPB and Garth Jordan of HFMA about digital transformation, and it will be awesome, so you should attend!!

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SURGE Spring is a free virtual conference for association professionals running on May 2^nd-4^th, and based on a simple premise: that transformation is a team effort.

We have always been committed to the potential of crowdsourcing and co-creation, and convinced that the most impactful and implementable solutions come from minds meeting – so SURGE Spring has been designed with co-creation in mind, every step of the way. Here’s what that looks like, and why it matters:

Before the Event…

• Opportunities for connection and collaboration begin immediately upon registering. Once you have signed up, you can join the conversations already taking place in the SURGE Spring forum, and catch some of the contagious creativity.
• Armed only with a camera phone, attendees can contribute directly to the conference. Throughout the event, you will be able to submit video responses that other attendees can watch.
• In order for sessions to resonate with and reflect real community concerns, we are running a pitch competition for the chance to craft and lead a session at the next conference in November. Attendees are now able to vote for the session they are most interested in seeing at the next conference, so that the content can speak to what really matters to the audience.

During the Event…

• Attendees will have exclusive access to 12 pre-recorded, expert-led sessions, each focused on the transformative potential of our associations. They are pre-recorded because the speakers are there live to answer any questions you have. This takes place in the chat, where you can also communicate with other attendees.
• We are eager to harness this collective knowledge even quantitatively. We are therefore introducing a polling function, which we will use during select sessions to ask questions, so that attendees can get a better understanding of where their association lies in relation to others.

After the Event…

• Collective knowledge is extremely powerful. After the event, we’ll go through and identify great insights from the speakers and attendees, and compile them into eBooks made available to the entire community.

Let’s learn from each other! The wonderful thing about co-creation, is that the more minds we have assembled, the stronger our transformative potential. Register now to join us in May, and add your mind to the mix!

Arianna Rehak runs AssociationSuccess.org, a digital publication and online community for association professionals.