The following is a small snippet from the 5-minute introductions given by all the leaders present during the Friday night Meet and Greet->
Jim Jefferies, VP of Government Relations
You can benefit most when you are aware of the government policies in play and their effect on you. There are 100 new members of congress that we have not had any contact with and this a huge priority for our organization. The key to our success is getting the information of the legislature in play out there to everyone and then getting their feedback.
Nita Patel, VP of Communications and Public Relations
Public Awareness- We are good from top down communication but we still need to work on bottom up communication. How can we take your best practices and share them with other members of IEEE-USA?
Gary Blank, VP of Career and Member Services
There are 6 committees involved in the Career and Member Services. Every section should have an active Consultants Network for multiple reasons. Having one means more money for your section and special recognition for your section members that participate in it.
Jim Look, VP of Professional Activities
We lose 80% of our student members in the transition from student members to professional members.We need to figure how to reverse this trend. We have a great opportunity via HKN, the EE honor society, to contact and influence highly qualified engineers so we should work to make this a high priority.
Charles Rubenstein, Region 1 Director
Charles addressed the format of the Annual Meeting->You should have the board available and all of the committees in IEEE-USA available during the weekend to answer your questions. He then asked how many audience members are members of committees and, furthermore, how many are meeting here this week.
Parviz Famouri, Region 2 Director-elect
Some of the challenges facing IEEE-USA is that the US membership is in decline and the life membership has increased, which means that the incoming revenue to IEEE is going to decline even further. Our priority is to ensure that we have a healthy membership in Regions 1-6 by ensuring that our members see the value of IEEE-USA and actively want to stay involved. Studies by IEEE have shown that new members are likely to join if introduced by a colleague. ROMP (Regional Outstanding Meeting Program) was started by Region 2 to highlight the most active sections in IEEE and what they did to achieve success.
David Green, Region 3 Director
We should never downplay the influence that IEEE has on Washington and the issues at large. We are finding that some of our more seasoned members are losing faith in IEEE and the benefits of societal membership. Many of us have been told at 5pm on a Friday that our help is no longer necessary and this is a tough pill to swallow if you do not have a network to support you in your time of need. Region 3 ran a project that identified sections hit hard by layoffs and provided online help to the people affected. IEEE is a network and if all of us work together then we have the ability to help each other and provide help in our times of need.
Jim Reiss, Region 4 Director
Finding and inspiring volunteers is a huge task for IEEE. Region 4 has an issue that it does not inspire it's members when it send outs communications, which is part of a large IEEE/IEEE-USA problem. A telephone call is better than nothing but never underestimate the power of a face-to-face meeting.
Candy Robinson, Region 5 Director
The biggest issue facing our members is that IEEE has lost its relevance (Sections Congress 2008). If we keep doing things the way that we have always done then we're never going to get there. The new ideas come from the sections and it's integral that the leadership start listening to the people on the ground if they want to be relevant to the members. We are doing some wonderful things but we need to start communicating the new tools at our disposal if we want to be relevant.
Ed Perkins, Region 6 Director
We need to figure out how to meet member needs. How can we better dessiminate information about opportunities from the leadership to the membership? Someone once described IEEE as a collection of social networks but we still choose to think of ourselves as a collection of technical networks so we're not figuring out how to engage each other more actively. We need to somehow get this message out that we are actively listening to the members and that we are able to provide them with ample value for their membership.
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