Today we bring you another look “Inside the Board,” from members of the STC Board of Directors on various topics of interest. Today, Hillary Hart discusses the Funding Task Force.
Building a Funding Model Together, or How to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Future
Reading some of the blogs and posts by STC and its members over the past year, you’d think another war had broken out—accusations flying back and forth about not listening to each other, not caring, not being transparent enough or not reading messages carefully enough. Yikes! Haven’t we had enough war—both military and political? It’s a lousy economy out there, folks, and we’ve got to help each other get through it and get more satisfaction out of our professional lives to boot.
With this in mind, I recently convened a task force of community leaders to work on building a fair and supportive funding model for all STC communities starting in 2011. The task force consists of group-chosen leaders from communities of various sizes and types (SIGs and chapters). Our tasks are to collect the best ideas from community leaders about how STC can support its member communities, vet and prioritize those ideas, propose the best ones to the STC Board, get their feedback, and then re-prioritize if necessary. We are a big task force of 19 members, and we have to:
- come to consensus about funding models and initiatives to suggest
- convince the BOD our conclusions are fair and workable
- go back to the drawing board when we need to
This is a tall order, especially for the two-month window that we have before the 2010 Summit in Dallas. So far, so good. We are in fact working together quite productively—all 19 of us—with of course the usual issues about which collaborative tools to use, what times to have phone calls, etc., etc. All the task force representatives share a passion for helping STC advance this rather ill-defined profession of ours.
Now, community members (chapters and SIGs) don’t always seem to be primarily interested in advancing Technical Communication—they sometimes seem more interested in schmoozing with each other and sharing food, drink, and laughs. That’s certainly a wonderful benefit of community membership. So many of us have made lifelong and dear friends in our communities, and we delight in making new friends in other communities—I had a great time last week dining and laughing with the Lone Star chapter in Dallas.
So, is the new a la carte community membership fee going to kill communities, especially the geographic ones? Is the Funding Task Force too late to save the communities? Well, the statistics so far from renewals and new memberships don’t seem to indicate any such demise. At least 85% of members are choosing a chapter and 115% are choosing a SIG.
The communities are moving energetically into the future, with webinars, podcasts, live broadcasts, and many other innovations. It’s not business as usual for anyone anymore, and certainly not for STC. But STC’s commitment to support its communities while also advancing the profession has not changed at all.