As a chapter, we are required to have an annual business meeting. This year’s business meeting is scheduled for this FRIDAY, September 17th at 7PM. We will be holding the business meeting in the banquet room of the Sizzler restaurant on 9000 South and State Street in Sandy. Dinner will be on your own, and you don’t need to buy dinner to join us.

In the most important part of this business meeting, the chapter administrative council will present the proposed bylaws for the chapter. Our chapter has never had official bylaws, so this is an important step forward for the chapter.

The proposed bylaws are posted online on the chapter website. You can review them here: http://www.intermountain-stc.org/about/intermountain-chapter-bylaws/

If you are unable to attend the chapter meeting, but would like to submit feedback on the bylaws, please send your feedback to president@intermountain-stc.org and we’ll consider it.

Also, if you are unable to attend, and would like to submit a proxy vote, you can send your vote to me at president@intermountain-stc.org and I’ll submit your vote on your behalf. The question that will be presented to the voting members will be: “Do you vote to accept the Intermountain STC Chapter bylaws as they are currently presented on the chapter Website?” We will then ask for votes in the affirmative, and votes in the negative.

If you have any questions about the process, please don’t hesitate to contact me. You can reach me at the e-mail address I gave above, or you are always welcome to contact me on my cell phone at 801-938-8391.

Thanks for your support of our chapter. We are looking forward to some great programming this fall and winter. If you have any suggestions, as always, let us know.

Last year, I was the incoming Intermountain Chapter president. I missed the beginning of Leadership Day where then-president Mark Clifford took the chapter presidents and SIG managers aside and dropped the bomb labeled “$1.2 million shortfall.” The rest of Leadership Day, most of which I attended, held a tense atmostphere. People were upset and probably panicking to some degree. I felt somewhat overwhelmed as a new chapter president stepping into office and being handed these problems.

I wouldn’t say that I doubted the Society board over the following twelve months, but I tried to voice my concerns where members of the board would hear them. I admit that my dissatisfaction with the board stemmed from a perception that they weren’t open and transparent enough. They solicited ideas from all members, but I didn’t see much communication back that described which ideas the board was discussing. I wasn’t alone on this.

This year, the proceedings of Leadership Day left me with a feeling of greater confidence in STC and its board. I believe that STC is moving forward with more strength and a clearer vision. We still have problems to solve and obstacles to remove, but I believe the board has made huge strides. I’ll tell you about four things that are reassuring for me.

Recommendations from the Community Support and Funding Task Force

Hillary Hart, now vice president of STC, assembled a task force with leaders of communities from all size categories. I had the opportunity to join but didn’t think I could give it the time it would deserve. But the task force surveyed members and made recommendations for board consideration that would boost the support that chapters receive and improve members’ perceptions of the organization and board.

The main recommendations that I support are:

• STC should position itself as the place to go for employers to find technical communicators.
• STC should position itself as the place to go for training on how to write technical papers and how to write technical presentations.
• STC should create a marketing committee to promote STC.

Having been told by chapter members who declined to renew membership this year that STC’s value level didn’t justify the cost, I felt strongly enough about these items that I stood up at an audience microphone and thanked the task force for their work and their recommendations. I think if acted on, these recommendations will significantly increase STC’s importance.

Certification

Cindy Currie announced that the board approved a plan for a work-based certification program with a revised plan due in June. Instead of having to pass an exam, practitioners in the field of tech comm can submit work to be critiqued in six areas. I wonder what this means for communicators who deliver proprietary, private, or sensitive information and will be finding out before the conference is over.

Still, this provides technical communicators with the opportunity to obtain credentials in the profession. As a result, employers will have this specific standard against which to judge candidates and know that someone who has been certified by STC has certain skills.

Marketing Committee

Of course, if employers continue to lack understanding of technical communicators, our skill sets, and why we’re important, they won’t care about our credentials. The task force recommended a marketing committee be formed, and this made perfect sense to me. Chapters have a PR manager position, so why isn’t there such a thing at the Society level?

Mike Hughes wrapped up Leadership Day with a preview of his speech for the annual business meeting the next evening, and he told us that he had already begun forming a marketing committee. This group will focus on making sure employers know who STC is and who technical communicators are.

Transparency and Building Trust

In his closing comments, Mike also told us that one of his emphases as president of the Society will be for the board to open up to the members a lot more. Mike wrote on his personal blog about struggles the board faced, and I think doing so increased his credibility because people could see that the board is composed of real people who wrestle with real problems, and it wasn’t their intent to force a policy or procedure on people. Mike’s posting about it didn’t hurt the board’s image in my mind.

Mike wants members of the board to speak more openly about their deliberations so that members of the Society can become engaged and offer input early—of course with the caveat that we will be listened to, but our ideas may not be acted on. But that openness and encouragement of conversation will help to build the trust that many members lost over the last year.

Wrap-Up

I believe that having made it through the financial crisis, STC can make big strides toward being what it should and being the gathering place for technical communicators of all varieties. It’s encouraging to have received confirmation that Mike and the rest of the board see our problems and want to engage in more open communication with the rest of the members.

When I renewed at the beginning of the year, I was giving the board a year to show me what they would do. After what happened on Leadership Day, I expect I’ll be renewing my membership again in 2011.

Cross-posted at http://gryphonmountain.net.

I am fortunate enough to have an employer that sets aside funds for each of us to attend a professional development conference, which is why I’m able to be here at STC Summit. I came with Ben Minson (our outgoing chapter president) and Tom Johnson (our chapter webmaster). At the conference I also ran into Greg Barrus, our vice-president-elect.

Ben and I attended Leadership Day, which occurs the day before the main conference. I loved leadership day! The atmosphere was very casual and inviting, and I gained a lot of great insight into running our chapter.

I want our chapter to work towards getting a chapter recognition next year at Summit, so I’m going to be working with our chapter board to prepare a program that will help us meet that goal. I believe that as we work towards getting a chapter recognition we will be providing more value to our chapter members, so I hope you will join me in working towards that goal.

Another goal that I have that is an outgrowth from Leadership Day is for our chapter to sponsor one or more web conferences. We will pay our presenter, and we will charge a nominal fee for members (slightly more for non-members), but we’ll charge enough to make a small profit for the chapter. (I’m thinking $15 for a member and $25 for a non-member with a $100 speaker fee — but those are just some initial thoughts; your input is more than welcome!) I’d like to market the webinar outside our chapter, so we can get members from all reaches of the globe who are invited to attend the session. If you are interested in this type of event, please let me know. And if you would like to be involved in planning something like this, make sure you get a hold of me so that we can work together to make this happen.

I think more than anything I learned two things from leadership day: (1) The society is alive and doing very well; and (2) the society-level board is made up of some awesome people.

First, I want to reassure our chapter members that the global STC organization is doing very well. I offer my sincere thanks and congratulations to our outgoing global board for their hard work in weathering the financial crisis of the last year. The organization as a whole is doing very well, and I think that with the changes that they have implemented and are implementing, we are going to see a stronger global organization that will be more capable of meeting the needs of our global membership.

Second, I want you to know that we have some great people on the society-level board. As members, we had the opportunity to elect these leaders, and frankly, I think we’ve done a great job. These board members are high-class people who are exceptionally friendly and are willing to bend over backwards to find out what we, the general membership, want. Remember, these society-level board members are just regular members  themselves who are volunteering to serve the society as a whole, and after rubbing shoulders with them for the last couple of days, I can assure you that I believe they are doing the best job they can. They are working hard, and they solicit your feedback. As members, I encourage you to contact the Society board and express your concerns and propose solutions that you would like to see. You can find contact information for the entire board at: http://www.stc.org/about/board-of-directors.asp .

Well, I didn’t intend to write a novel, but I want you to know that I have confidence in our organization. I’m excited to be a member of STC right now, and I’m thrilled to be our next chapter president. I hope we can work together to make this an amazing year. It will be as we come together as a team that we are able to make this organization stronger and help shape it into the organization that we want it to become.

If you feel, though, that your voice isn’t being heard or that you can provide guidance for the chapter’s program, becoming an officer will give you a chance for frequent and direct input into what the chapter offers. You will also be able to interact with some very talented and enthusiastic people, just as I have.

To run for a position, fill out and submit the Candidate Election Form.

Elections will proceed on the following schedule:

• Sunday, Feb 28: Deadline for sending in your Candidate Election Form.  The Nominating Committee selects candidates.
• Saturday, March 6: The Nominating Committee announces candidates. Voting opens.
• Monday, March 22: Voting ends. 
• April: Results announced at the chapter event. (More information coming.)

For information about positions, see the Chapter Leaders page. Feel free to contact any of the current officers to ask questions about their positions.

I again invite you to run for office, join a great group of officers, and help guide the chapter’s direction in 2010 and 2011.

Note: The overall STC organization’s election process is also proceeding. See schedule and candidate information.

Announcement on the STC's Notebook blog about the dues increase for 2010

Last month, STC announced a dues increase, a measure that the officers and staff had been promising since they had to take a good hard look at how to stay afloat. When announcing this change on STC’s blog, STC President Cindy Currie said:

STC spends, on average, just under $250 to provide services to a member, yet dues rates have been well below that amount. As I mentioned earlier, for several years the revenue generated by the annual conference and our earnings from invested reserves have covered the difference—until now. We need to change our business model and adopt a pay-as-you-go approach.

In 2010, dues will cover basic member benefits with a la carte pricing for additional features. The core benefits remain, but with some changes. Basic dues do not include membership in a chapter and SIG. You are encouraged to take advantage of the many local and virtual benefits offered by chapters and SIGs by purchasing a la carte membership for $25 USD and $10 USD, respectively. All members will receive the electronic version of our publications. Print subscriptions to Intercom and Technical Communication are available for $30 USD and $75 USD respectively. The 2010 membership fees, approved by the Board of Directors, are:

Basic Membership         $215 USD
Students                        $ 75 USD
Retirees                        $145 USD

This means that if you pay for basic membership and add one chapter and SIG membership, you’re paying $250, a $75 increase over last year. To get print copies of Intercom and Technical Communication, you’ll pay $355, double the amount it cost for 2009 for equivalent benefits.

A Hard Hit

This is bad news for many STC members. A number of Intermountain Chapter members are self-employed, freelancers, university or college faculty, or unemployed, and this kind of expense can be hard to justify. Because employers have been cutting back expenses, many no longer sponsor STC memberships for their employees. It has been pointed out that with the current state of the economy, now was the worst time for STC to raise dues so drastically; the irony is that it was the state of the economy that caused STC to take a close look at the weak aspects of its financial model.

Tom Johnson, our Web committee manager, recently sent out a link to a brief survey to the chapter listserv, asking if members of the chapter plan to renew and why. If you haven’t yet, please take the survey. As of this writing, 46 out of about 80 chapter members have responded.

Thanks to those who discussed the dues increase on the listserv. Your views have given me a picture of how problematic the dues increase is for our chapter.

Some Frankness from the President

To be honest, I’m disappointed about the dues increase. I voiced my concern as well that eliminating the pass-through funds from STC from the dues of our members would cause problems for small chapters like ours. This has been a frustrating and troubling process to watch.

From what members of the chapter have said, a major concern is that STC’s offerings don’t justify the dues. For many, the benefits from the parent organization don’t add up. When people spend a couple hundred dollars on something, they expect some cold, hard returns, and rightly so. The fact is that if the benefits are apparent and substantial enough, then the cost is less of an issue. The problem is that the current benefits aren’t substantial enough for a number of members.

Our chapter isn’t the only one that is struggling with this problem. Many chapter presidents are concerned about loss of membership, projected and real.

What I Ask of You

While many of you will not be renewing your STC membership, I ask you to stick with the Intermountain Chapter. Our goal for this year has been to provide relevant events, but due to some of the feedback we’ve received, we’ve met with mixed success in the last several months. We have more people attending our events than last year, but we can certainly do better. I encourage you to continually provide us with feedback and suggestions, whether you’re an STC member or not.

I have heard some concern over STC’s seemingly offhand prediction that 40% of members will not renew. While that many or more of Intermountain’s members may not renew, you are still welcomed and encouraged to participate in our chapter’s functions. Whatever the parent organization’s view of this loss is, I don’t look at you as an expected casualty. We need each of you.

I see the Intermountain Chapter taking the role of sponsor of tech comm–related activities in our area. We do charge non-STC-members for some events, but we plan to do so only when it’s necessary to sustain the activities, and we’ll keep that cost as low as possible. We hold students and members of sister organizations at the same level as STC members when it comes to cost of events.

The chapter officers are working out our plan for our 2010 events, but they are by no means set in stone. Your input is valuable to us. The Intermountain Chapter can be a means of keeping the tech comm community together at this point.

If you can renew with STC, please do so. The officers and staff have had to get past the initial problem of the cash shortfall; now that that danger seems to be behind STC for 2009, your dues are still needed for 2010. Many voices have contributed ideas to what STC can offer, and I hope that if we stick around and give STC our support, we will see some great things happen over the next year that will assure us that our dues were well spent.

To those who can’t renew, please stay subscribed to the listserv and this website, and participate as much as you can. You are part of our community even if you’re not on the STC membership roster.

Wrap-up

The dues increase is hard to swallow. We can all probably think of something else we can do with $250 or $350. I completely understand if you have weighed the cost against the benefits and decided that STC membership isn’t what you need in 2010. That’s a decision each person has to make. I hope you will continue to participate and give the officers input.

Right now, it’s anyone’s guess where STC will be a year from now. The international officers and staff have done a lot of work to get STC out of the position it was in back in May, but there is much to be done still to help all members feel that what they get from STC they can’t get anywhere else. Many brilliant and experienced people are talking, and we hope that this turns into brilliant action.

Just remember that whether you renew or not for 2010, the Intermountain Chapter can be your technical communication community.

Me sitting in my chair at home

Welcome to the new Intermountain-STC Chapter website. The chapter board is excited to launch this site and offer chapter members many more resources than we had before. Thanks to Tom Johnson for building the site and to the rest of the board for their contributions. The site provides a public face to the strength that our chapter is gaining.

You are probably aware that STC is in severe financial trouble, with the year-end shortfall anticipated as high as $1.2 million. The main STC leaders and staff are working on a recovery plan using ideas from community leaders and members. The first update on their progress is coming at the end of August.

The bad news is that STC is planning on raising dues because the cost of supporting each member is higher than the dues collected. STC has relied principally on the annual conference as a moneymaker, and this past conference showed that if not enough people attend, the conference doesn’t make up for the gap between dues and member costs. A dues raise has been promised, but we don’t yet know the specific amount. STC has also asked chapters to move to zero-based budgeting, to set a budget through the end of 2010, and send surplus funds to the main office to help the Society come out of the shortfall.

It can be tempting at a time like this to drop out of the organization, especially if the downturn in the economy adversely affected your employment. I encourage you to stick with STC and see this through. Due to various circumstances that I won’t elaborate on here, the Intermountain chapter had a slow 2008—2009 year. You may ask, “What has STC done for me? How has my membership really benefited me?” If you’re asking that now and come up short of answers, I expect that if you stay with STC and ask again in a year, you will have plenty of answers.

We now have a substantial board of committed individuals. Our objective is to maximize the benefits that the chapter can offer you as its members. The board just met on August 1 to work on our program, and we plan to offer benefits in the areas of relevant site content, mentoring, employer relationships, career boosting, networking, and skills development. For example, on this site, we plan to build an information library, and we welcome all chapter members to contribute. This effort will serve as a locally relevant version of STC’s body of knowledge (under development at http://stcbok.editme.com), and parts of our library will likely be relevant for the STC repository. Another major aim will be to help those of you who are looking for work to find it.

So the bad news is that STC will soon cost members more to join. (I would like to highlight the fact that if you join STC from October to the end of the year, the year’s worth of dues carries your membership through the entire following year.) The good news is that the Intermountain Chapter board is going to do the best we can to provide value for every cent. I believe that if you have already paid membership dues, you shouldn’t have to pay additional fees for benefits that you deserve as a member.

Meanwhile, if you would like to do what you can to help save STC, various options are available:

• Participate in the discussions at STC Ideas and voice your own ideas. The STC board is listening. (Bill Swallow sent an STC Ideas invitation to STC members who requested to receive communications from STC. Click the link in the email to enter the first time, or sign in at http://stcideas.ning.com and use the email address you have on file with STC and your existing Ning password if you have one. If you can’t get in, contact Bill through his site, http://techcommdood.com.)
• Contribute a tax-deductible donation to STC directly to help overcome the shortfall. Further, if you work in a for-profit organization, speak with your employer about a corporate, tax-deductible donation to STC.
• Visit www.GoodSearch.com; in the box that reads “Who do you GoodSearch for?” enter Society for Technical Communication and click Verify. Once STC has been verified as part of the network, use the search engine on the same page for all your searching needs—each search will raise money for STC.
• STC receives a small royalty from sales that are generated via the Amazon.com portal on the STC website (http://www.stc.org). Try purchasing books through that portal if possible.

I’m looking forward to a great year. We hope to have a rich variety of offerings for you that will boost your career, your abilities, and your network. We still have some officer positions open and can always benefit from your participation on the committees. Please visit the Chapter Leaders page to see where you can help.

With your assistance, STC can come out of its current state a stronger, leaner, and more relevant organization for its members and the industry. I look forward to meeting more of you and working with you during the year. I ask that as you see the benefits of your membership, you’ll talk to colleagues and members of your professional network about those benefits and encourage them to participate. And of course, if you ever have feedback or ideas for me, please don’t hesitate to let me know. You can reach me at btminson(at)gmail(dot)com.