Friday, February 3, 2012

Innovation Day!

Graphic Record of Innovation Day created by Greg Gersch
We held a Day of Innovation on Monday in our office. Our Executive Director introduced the idea prompted by an ASAE initiative. A team of staff worked for about a month to pull together a day filled with activities that would help us take a fresh look at our work. 

The team solicited input from staff on session topics and we tapped into our pool of trained facilitators to lead sessions. I gathered resources for each topic to give the facilitators a jumping off point and to provide information to staff that wanted to pursue a topic further. Maggie McGary, our online community and social media manager, mentioned to me that Pinterest is the 3rd most popular referring site to the ASHA blogInspired to do things differently, I decided to create an account and organize the materials on Pinterest. I liked the virtual bulletin board concept and found it easily conducive to organizing materials from a variety of media. I interviewed people throughout the day creating short videos on my iPhone and it was simple to upload them to You Tube and pin them to the Pinterest site. A lot of us are finding Pinterest addictive, so consider yourself warned. (I kind of wish I would have created two accounts now -- one for business and one personal, but oh well. Half the time I wouldn't know where to draw that line anyway.)  

More directly related to wellness, Innovation Day inspired one of our staff members to suggest we acquire a few devices that people could use to be more active at their desks like those little bike pedal things. (Thanks Karen!) Has anyone tried this at work? I'm thinking I'll order a couple gadgets and let some folks try it out. We all know how unhealthy it is to sit for long periods of time.

A true highlight of the day was the graphic record above created by Greg Gersch



Interested in using Pinterest? Check out Pinterest for Associations: New Audience, New Addiction by Deirdre Reid.


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