Originally found at Associations Now by Mark Athitakis

In 2010, the Academy of Management anticipated that it would soon reach a crossroads: By 2020, more than half its members would hail from outside North America. Much of that growth had been organic, and AOM, which represents management and organization scholars, needed a strategy to better serve its increasingly global membership.

“We did a comprehensive membership survey to ask how the academy could become indispensable to them,” says Terese M. Loncar, AOM’s chief operating officer. “A lot of the responses were, ‘Have a meeting in my backyard.’”

Simple enough. But AOM wanted to make sure that any initiative to launch regional meetings didn’t cannibalize its big annual meeting, which was regularly held in North America and attracted more than half its attendees from outside the continent.

So AOM’s approach has been to think small and build regionally. It’s hosted workshops for as few as 50 attendees in places like Ghana, Hong Kong, and Chile, where there’s a known base of academics in the field. From there, AOM builds partnerships with schools to launch regional specialized conferences for as many as 500, targeting those prior workshop attendees in Chile, for example, to attend a larger meeting in Mexico City.

Continue reading the original article at Associations Now.