What is Engagement? Communications With & Among Your Members

David Green, director-elect of Region 3, described methods for engaging and communicating with members.

He began by discussing what engagement is and why individuals engage IEEE. Here are a few reasons:

• Access to technical information
• Career development tools
• Continuing education
• Access to discounts
• Venue to give back to society and the profession
• Creation of content
• Social networking
• To make a difference

Green said the most important things to remember are that “engagement should be person-to-person and is an obligation that if we practice it, there can be benefits.”

There are many ways to communicate with members in your local section and Green touched on several, which are described below.

Send a broadcast e-mail to the masses. How do you do that?

• Form a group reflector address (requires adding e-mail addresses yourself to list)
• Send through E-Notice (uses member database to send to all members of a section or all members in a specific zip code, etc.)
• Use mail merge to create messages that can be personalized with person’s name in the message and the person’s specific e-mail address in the TO field (use SAMIEEE)

What should you do?

• Customize the e-mail for the specific audience
• Provide links to the resources cited
• Keep message short
• Provide layered message (inverted pyramid journalistic style)
• Provide feedback/participation avenues

If you have a section web site, it should include a:

• Search box
• Roadmap for site users
• Mechanism for feedback (officer e-mail addresses or form) and monitor it

Another idea is to create a group for your section or chapter on social networks including:

• LinkedIn - use discussions to ask questions of importance to members
• Facebook
• Second Life (and other virtual worlds)
• Plaxo

IEEE and IEEE-USA have many tools for communicating with the members in your section, so get out there and use them!