Transparency, Liability, and Communication

News from the Board

By Paula Berger
STC President

When I was elected, one of my goals was to promote transparency, to allow STC members a clearer view into what the Board was doing and why. Another of my goals was to increase communications between the Board and the members.

Have I met those goals? We created the News & Notes e-mail newsletter to bring you news while it’s fresh. Our readership survey told us that members want Intercom to focus on articles dealing with the profession. Only 2% of the readers valued the Society Pages. That was surprising, since we get so many questions about Society news. So we dug deeper.

We found out that the low percentage of interest in the Society Pages has two very different sources. First, some members truly don't care about Society news. They want articles about the profession and high-quality educational content, but they are just not interested in the business and politics of the Society. Second, even interested members prefer to get Society news through the Web site or e-mail, like this newsletter or the e-mail bulletins we have begun to send more often. They want more timely communication. News & Notes fills that need.

What about my goal of telling you what the Board is doing and why? We have included articles about decisions made by the STC Board in Intercom, News & Notes, and Tieline (the newsletter targeted at STC community leaders). We have posted new policies on the Web site as they have been adopted, such as the new Diversity Policy. And there has been a sharp increase in our marketing communications.

However, we have fallen short on posting information on the Web site about each Board meeting and teleconference call. From September to March, we didn’t post much. I’d like to explain why this happened.

The first reason is time. The STC Board and staff have been extremely busy making many, many changes in STC this year. We’ve all been so busy that we have just not had time to document everything with the detail that do the topics justice—yet. Among other things, we need to update all our policy and guidelines documents.

The second reason is the tension between transparency and liability, the need to balance our desire to tell members what is happening against potentially exposing the Society to liability. I—and most others on the Board—want to post both the slides that focus our Board discussions and the minutes that record our actions. But the Board has access to a range of information that we use to make decisions, and some of that information, if shared with the membership, might be construed as potentially harming someone's reputation or exposing STC's financial and competitive strategies to those who might take advantage of the knowledge at the Society's expense.

We asked STC's legal counsel for advice on what to do. She recommended following a standard association format for minutes that focuses on decisions that were made by the Board and minimizes, if not entirely eliminates, discussion of why those decisions were made. The legal theory: the shorter the better.

We asked our Executive Director, Susan Burton, who is a Certified Association Executive (CAE). She agreed with our legal counsel that the minutes should focus on decisions, not discussion. She advised us that the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) does not recommend posting minutes on a Web site. In fact, many associations restrict access to Board minutes to Board members.

This debate has gone on for several months. After much deliberation and discussion, STC Secretary Char James-Tanny and I decided that transparency is more important than a potential lawsuit filed against STC because of something that appears in the minutes.

We will now go back and post two files for each Board meeting or conference call. One file contains the Board slides that we use for the agenda and committee updates. We have now posted the slides from the October Board meeting in London and the monthly teleconference calls from November to February. The second files contain the meeting minutes. Once our legal counsel reviews the minutes and the Board votes to approve them, these files will be posted too.

For the remaining few months that I am President, we will post the slides within a week of the Board call or meeting and we will post the minutes within a month. Thank you for your patience as we worked through this issue.