President's Midterm Report

By Hillary Hart | STC President

Last year about this time, then-president Mike Hughes started a tradition of providing a midterm report on, as he put it, “where we are and where we still need to go.” I would like to continue that tradition. From where I stand, I see five major accomplishments of 2011.

1. First of all, we can say that Project Phoenix—the big STC project of last year—has been a success. The number of visits to the website has increased about 15% in the period of 1 July 2011–30 November 2011, compared with the same period last year. Unique visitors have increased by 18% and, most importantly, the time folks are spending on the website has increased by 25%. More people are coming to the site and are finding more reasons to stick around. We are collecting a full array of analytics and will analyze them over the next couple of months to improve the user experience even more.
2. As an educator, I am particularly pleased that STC has maintained and strengthened a culture of learning this past year. In fact, our educational offerings have boomed. In the past four years, the number of live webinars has increased by four-fold (from 14/year to 56/year). Certificate courses (which didn't exist four years ago) have increased by four-fold in the past three years. And STC held its first virtual day-long conference in November. If I had had any doubts about the value of virtual conferences, Applying Research in Practice erased them. Hosted by Saul Carliner, this virtual conference allowed participants to be active and vocal learners without interrupting the speaker. You could just watch learning happening on many levels. And, finally, STC now offers 38 archived seminars free to members—sessions from previous Summits—with more to come this spring.
3. Perhaps the biggest step we took this year was to set up a TC certification program, administered by a Certification Commission. The Certified Professional Technical Communicator™ (CPTC) credential will help promote the profession by increasing recognition, respect, and salaries. It will also allow certified professionals to stand out in a crowded job market and provide employers with assurances about the quality of their hires.
4. While holding dues steady for the third year in a row, STC developed a new category of membership for those coming out of degree programs: New TC Professional. Dues for this category are halfway between regular and student memberships, thus easing the transition into the TC workplace for new first-career or second- (or third-) career members. New TC Professional membership is open to anyone who has graduated within the previous three years.
5. Informed by the Global Audit Task Force report, the Board has renewed its commitment to support and serve the technical communication profession globally. The survey results that chair Kit Brown and her committee members presented to the Board suggested many ways to provide educational and professional benefits to STC members wherever they live.

So where do we go from here? In the coming year, Alan Houser (who will take over as President in May 2012) and I look forward to expanding these initiatives and adding more. STC is committed to expanding the number of educational webinars and virtual conferences, offering expert learning opportunities at a very reasonable price and during many different time zones.

If you check out the preliminary program for the 2012 STC Summit in Rosemont (20–23 May), you will see that we already have dozens of great speakers and sessions lined up: sessions such as Building a Developer Documentation Wiki, Destroying the Box, Putting the Sexy Back in Tech Com, Publishing in a New Media Landscape, Data Visualization: Seeing through the Numbers, and Collaboration in a Decentralized Culture. Other sessions on content strategy, localization, agile development, ePubs, CMSs, Web design, mobile, HTML5, and more will help you compete in (or teach for) today's multi-faceted technical communication workplace. These sessions represent a variety of areas that go “beyond writing” and in which technical communicators are actively engaged. May 2012 may seem a long way away, but we all know how time flies.

Finally, I would like to remember former STC President Suzanna Laurent, who passed away 26 December 2011. Suzanna served the Society as president from 2005–2006 with great dedication, fortitude, and gentleness. It was a time of transition in STC's governance structure, and Suzanna held together the various factions with grace and courage. We will miss her greatly.