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by Ed Hiscock, editor in chief |
After the meetings are over
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As I write this, we at HQ are deep into the committee season, with dozens of members making the trek to Lawrence to review programs, voice opinions and give strategic direction to GCSAA’s leadership and staff.
Maybe you’ve served on a GCSAA committee and are aware of how the process works and how outcomes are handled. If you haven’t, you’re probably in the dark about what the GCSAA staff does after the meetings are over.
I’m involved on behalf of the publications department in the yearly meeting of GCSAA’s Strategic Communications Committee, which offers perspective and recommendations on how to communicate to the membership — and to the outside world — the association’s key messages and member-positioning efforts.
The Strat Comm members left the building recently enough that some of them may not have all their luggage yet, so the meeting’s fresh in my mind. The outcomes most relevant to me and the GCM staff included feedback on the magazine’s redesign and on the one-year anniversary of GCSAA This Week, the association’s members-only electronic newsletter.
We were pleased with the feedback on both publications, but it’s not the committee’s reaction to the changes that best illustrates what happens after a committee meeting, but rather how previous versions of the Strat Comm helped shape our GCM and GCSAA This Week discussions this year.
The committee last year got a sneak peak at the redesigned GCM, heard about the new “Insider” section with the new one-page features such as “Inside your shop,” “Inside your career,” “Inside your environment,” etc., and let us know their reaction to the changes.
The GCM staff did the entire redesign, and the members’ feedback last year gave us plenty to think about as to whether our plans for the magazine were going to work. Did we change some things because of what the members told us? You bet.
The GCSAA This Week conversation, which concentrated on whether that publication was doing what it was designed to do, really stretched back to the Strat Comm meeting two years ago, when the committee discussed discontinuing Newsline, the printed members-only publication, and creating an electronic replacement. While this year’s committee said that This Week is fulfilling its charter, it was the committee two years ago that, in effect, designed the publication.
That version of Strat Comm told us that it wanted fresher member-related information in smaller, easier-to-digest bites and that it wanted GCSAA to slash the number of e-mails it was sending to members.
That meeting set us about using 2006 to create the e-newsletter you see each Tuesday, which includes only the most important things members need to know each week and cuts down on the e-mails you get from the association.
These examples of committee meeting aftermaths come from one department after one committee meeting, and meetings usually involve more than one department. GCSAA has about 19 committees and advisory groups, so if you’re wondering what staff does after these meetings, the experience of my department is as good an example as any.
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