Society chapters often involve members who live and work in a very wide geographic area. Even members of chapters with smaller physical areas face long commute times from work sites to meeting sites. Often, the time spent commuting is enough to discourage even the most stalwart Society member from participation. Chapter leaders and committee managers are left with the problem of how to offer their members the means to participate in meetings more effectively.

An Inescapable and Problematic Geography

The James River Chapter STC includes members who live and work in almost all regions of the Commonwealth of Virginia, from Fredericksburg south to Henderson, North Carolina, from the Atlantic Ocean west to the Allegheny Mountains and the borders of Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia.

Thus, our chapter might be better known as the Richmond chapter or the Tidewater chapter. It is simply too far for many of our members to drive to a meeting, regardless of where we hold it. Meetings held in Newport News, Norfolk, Virginia Beach, or Suffolk would exclude members who live in Richmond, Charlottesville, Harrisonburg, and Roanoke. Similarly, meetings held in Richmond—as we know from experience—are difficult to attend for those who don’t live in this metropolitan area. It doesn’t matter what topic is presented or by whom—the distances involved are simply overwhelming.

Since 2004, active participation in our meetings has dwindled from an average of fifteen members to four. Participation in regional conferences, however, remains strong—averaging forty people. The difference, of course, is that we schedule the conferences on weekends at a hotel in Williamsburg that offers us very reasonable rates. Monthly program meetings, on the other hand, have been traditionally held in the middle of the week after normal working hours.

One thing is also inescapably clear: if less than 10 percent of a chapter’s membership is able to participate in its program, then 90 percent of its members derive little (if any) benefit from their membership. No chapter can long survive if this holds true.

Solutions

After identifying our problem of geography, the chapter leadership discussed several possible solutions:

Subdivide the chapter into regions. We could petition the Society to break up the James River Chapter into more distinctly regional units, such as Tidewater, Richmond, Piedmont, and Shenandoah Valley.
Move program meetings to weekend conclaves. We could also move away from the model of holding monthly meetings on a weeknight, and hold Saturday miniconferences instead. These could be held in different cities or towns.
Switch to a teleconference mode. We could make use of technology to offer members the ability to participate remotely in our monthly meetings.
Give up. We could petition the Society to dissolve the chapter due to lack of active participation, and the difficulties inherent in fostering increased, active membership.

And the Winner Is . . .

After more than a little thought, our chapter leaders decided to try the remote meeting concept. First, we found a company in Tidewater and another in Richmond that possessed video teleconferencing facilities, and advertised our programs accordingly. Members in the Tidewater and Richmond areas could now go to the teleconferencing site in their locale and participate in real time. This worked better than the old format (holding meetings only in Richmond), but participation among members in the Tidewater area was not as strong as we’d hoped. And, members who lived and worked outside of these two regions were left out completely!

Moving Along

In 2007, the new chapter administrative council decided to plunge into the world of remote teleconferencing. We established subscriptions with a Web-conferencing provider, GoToMeeting, and AccuConference, an audio teleconferencing provider, to get the best value for our limited budget. Toll-free teleconferencing costs us $0.49 per minute per line used; Web conferencing costs us $468.00 per year for fifteen participants per conference (the number of conferences is unlimited).

No Web camera is involved, so participants don’t see each other or the program presenter. The participants, however, can see the desktop of the presenters, hear each other, and also ask questions or make comments during the online meeting.

Meetings can be held from anywhere: the organizer can be at his or her home and start the conference from there, and guests don’t have to travel long distances to make their presentations. All who participate must download a utility that allows them to log on to the Web conference and have the presentation displayed on their monitor. Individuals call the toll-free phone line provided and use the participant code to join the audio presentation.

This format is equally usable for meetings of the chapter administrative council members—not all of whom live in the same region—and for online seminars or phone-Web seminars. The chief limitation is with the Web-conferencing program: our current subscription is limited to fifteen participants per session, but as participation grows, we will move to a more expensive subscription level.

There’s More. . .

The fact is, chapter services and communication are not limited to meetings and

meeting formats. If we want to encourage greater participation and ownership of the chapter and its programs, we needed to reconsider the entirety of our communication infrastructure.

Taking this into consideration, we rebuilt our Web site using Joomla, an open-source content management system, and incorporated these components:

Community Builder, for user management
JEvents, providing a calendar and mini-calendar as well as event scheduling
Attend Sessions, an event-scheduling and reservation extension

Anyone who visits our Web site can register to participate in our meetings. The meetings are announced in the calendar; participants click the title of the session to display its particulars. The event description is given along with the location, or venue, for those who wish to attend (a link to a Google Map is also provided for event sites or venues).

If the visitor wishes to register for a meeting, he or she completes the reservation form and clicks the Register button. Since, in this case, there’s no charge to participate, the site takes the visitor directly to a page confirming his or her reservation, and provides the log-in details needed to participate online if the person wishes to do so. A copy of this information is also automatically sent to the registrant by e-mail.

Visitors and chapter members can register accounts on our Web site and with our forum. Upon registration they can:

Participate in online discussions of relevant topics
Create and edit personal blogs
Create and edit articles of interest to the online community
Send messages to each other using the private messaging utility or through their e-mail client
Review and download documents relevant to the chapter and to the Society
Send e-mail to all members through the chapter’s Mailman list
Manage their own profile information
All articles and blog entries submitted to our site are monitored and must be published by an authorized administrator.

Provide Increased Benefits

It is not an easy task to rebuild trust and commitment among members who have felt no connection with the chapter and its program over the years. That this situation was caused not by personal bias or unconcern but by geography is of no matter. Despite the moves made to bring the chapter and its program closer to those who can use it and benefit from it, acceptance and participation have not yet evidenced unqualified success. This is something we continue to work on.

But, if we had not taken these programmatic steps, we would be in no position to offer increased benefits to our members. And, let’s not forget—we’re also benefiting ourselves as members of the chapter and Society.

Leadership is hard to define, and the steps necessary to lead are often difficult to undertake. Mistakes will be made and lessons must be learned. I strongly believe, though, that leaders lead. Chapter leadership must focus on members and their needs, even when those needs are not, at first, clearly identified. Ultimately, members will see that their comments and participation are valued, and they will respond.

meetings and events

communication department

November 2007

Focused Leadership in a Dispersed Environment