Jason Buffington .com

Join your local chapter!

To all my friends in the Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery industry go join your local chapter of the Association of Continuity Professionals (ACP).

• If you’re a BC/DR professional, these are your people. The monthly meetings are usually delivered by experts from local companies and you’ll hear how BC/DR is really accomplished by your peers.  Huge learning opportunity!
• If you’re a marketer in BCDR solutions, these are whom you need to have empathy with. I promise if you attend a few meetings and listen to how they describe their challenges, their strategies, and their methods, you will be better equipped to tell your stories to that kind of persona.
• If you are a seller of BCDR solutions, these are potentially your customers. Now is NOT the time to sell to them. Now is the time to learn what really matters to them (in aggregate) so that as you work with similar organizations, one-on-one, you’ll have empathy to actually be able to help them solve their problems.

Pro tip: even if you don’t pay the 100 plus dollars for annual membership, you can probably still go to at least one meeting as a guest.

That’s said, if you are a vendor or service provider, most chapters appreciate corporate sponsors, whether it’s an annual financial gift or maybe just buy lunch for one of the monthly meetings. If you do, you might even get 10 minutes to tell your story.

OH, if you are not in the BCDR industry, go find the organization that connects the users of your products or service category – i.e., your audience.

Because, regardless of your role, joining and listening will give you empathy and understanding and maybe even help you discover your next career jump. So, go find a local org and plug in. You will be better for it.

See you next Monday