Here it is — a sneak preview of one of the most highly anticipated content engines that will be available through The Center for Association Leadership when it launches in November — the Innovation and Excellence project.

The Center for Association Leadership is envisioned as "a state-of-the-art learning environment, " a learning community to help association professionals and business partners create the future. And while the Center won’t open its doors for another six months, a great deal of work has already been done behind the scenes to stock its knowledge resources.

No 21st century learning community would be complete without an online collection of leading-edge programs. The Innovation and Excellence project identifies and showcases creative and effective programs to serve as models for developing the associations — and the communities — of the future.

When GWSAE first engaged Plexus Consulting Group to develop the content for The Center for Association Leadership Innovation and Excellence Project, we never imagined the potential for this database of leading-edge case studies to revolutionize thought leadership beyond the association profession.

Associations are at the crossroads of every professional community and industry worldwide. While these nonprofit organizations routinely wrestle with their share of day-to-day challenges, they are in an a unique position to tap, implement, and disseminate the best thought leadership that their member communities can provide. In capturing their stories and migrating them onto a user-friendly knowledge platform, the Center will enable users to leverage these "real-life" blueprints for success to create more holistic and effective communities.

What follows is a first look at some of the cases that have been selected for the Innovation and Excellence project.

Behind the Scenes

The pages of Executive Update and other business publications are peppered with stories of innovation and excellence. The challenge for GWSAE and Plexus was to transform that universe of content into an unprecedented, systematic, and user-friendly knowledge platform of practical how-to advice. The solution was to create an online library of ideas that transcends industry and professional boundaries to benefit employees and managers in any organization anywhere, helping them to achieve their full potential.

The Innovation and Excellence project profiles leading edge association practices in a wide variety of functional areas.

The Innovation and Excellence case studies are organized into functional and thematic areas to help users compare and contrast unique approaches to similar challenges across a wide variety of industries and professions. In addition to providing a short abstract of basic facts about each association, including contact information, size, staffing, mission, membership, and a link to its home page, each case tells the story of how the association addressed a particular challenge or opportunity in an innovative and successful manner.

Together, GWSAE and Plexus identify cases, conduct interviews, and develop and illustrate the case with an interactive format.

Identifying the case

Is it innovative? Is it excellent? Is the story ready for prime time?

The first step in developing the Innovation and Excellence database is to search the association community for models of program excellence. How? By casting the widest possible net, networking, scanning publications and award listings, GWSAE identified numerous programs in each category. The objective is to identify successful models with strong lessons, enthusiastic patrons, and good potential for broad application.

While many of the programs identified for the Innovation and Excellence project have won numerous awards, others were shaped quietly and brought to the attention of GWSAE in a passing conversation. These are some of the most interesting.

The interview

Once a case is identified, the originators are contacted to determine their interest in participating in the project. Once a model is sufficiently beyond the "work-in-progress" stage to serve as a completed case study, an interview is scheduled with the key association contact to elicit the details behind the case. In many instances, we find that association executives who have developed some of the most creative and thoughtful approaches are surprised that anyone would consider their program to be leading edge.

Developing and illustrating the case

The GWSAE strategy and learning team has developed a basic format to capture the information. Developing the format involved repeated fine tuning of the content parameters to build a compelling, consistent, user-friendly framework for organizing and presenting the cases. Each case profiles the challenge or opportunity, solution, process, unanticipated consequences, measurement and results, and lessons learned. In addition, GWSAE has collected the supporting documents for each case. Web links incorporated in the cases will provide these supporting documents as resource materials, such as surveys and press releases to better illustrate the story and the process behind the model.

Putting it all together

Two universal themes have emerged from developing the knowledge platform: "community is everything" and "there are no mistakes, just opportunities for lessons learned."

One major goal of the project is to show that real-life challenges and frustrations must be overcome to develop successful programs. To the extent possible, there is no glossing over rough patches. While it is easy to relate success stories, it is much more difficult to candidly address the hurdles and difficulties that these stories routinely entail. In putting it all together, the GWSAE strategy and learning team is working with Internet technology experts to transform and integrate the draft content into a crisply designed and custom-branded Center for Association Leadership Web site.