ENVIRONMENTAL SCAN
The CESSE Board needs to establish an environmental scanning process that identifies and tracks strategic issues. We will Establish a real time environmental scanning process-toolset that will give all a customized way to extract the latest, up-to-date scanning information/picture, on a need basis, allowing “filtering” based on a number of select parameters each CEO could select from.
Association Trends: The following are significant trends stemming from recent research and observations about what associations will look like and the challenges that they will face over the next 5 years. CESSE must acknowledge the impact that these trends have on the member associations and develop a related product offering that will allow the member organizations to positively respond to these challenges.
- Value Proposition: Many members will probably belong to a fewer number of not-for-profit organizations in the future. They will make their choices based on their perception of the association’s ROI. They want two things which are of equal importance: High quality programs, products and services; and to have an “enjoyable” experience and be able to define what an enjoyable experience means to them.
- Competition: For-profit organizations are increasingly finding a new market place in the not-for-profit world. They are providing products and services that have been traditional mainstays of associations. They will leave the break-even or subsidized programs to the associations.
- Financial Resources: The impact of the current economic down-turn on associations includes slowing membership growth, the inability to increase dues in a difficult economic environment, and reduced non-dues revenue brought about by decreased discretionary spending such as meeting attendance, sponsor support, etc. Associations cannot chase a profitable business line that is inconsistent with their reason for existing and, to some measure, are required to provide services that can be resource drains rather than profit centers. Loss of one or more of their profit centers creates significant financial stability issues for membership associations. Successful associations will focus on increasing the diversity of their revenue streams.
- Human Resources: There will be a significant strain on existing resources. Declining volunteerism has been a growing challenge for associations for some time but over the next five years the challenge will increase. Volunteer trends and issues include: Employers will provide less direct financial support for travel costs for their employees who are involved in volunteerism. In many cases, downsizing has increased individual workloads and is all but eliminating extra time for volunteerism. In addition, many individuals indicate that the demands of their work and personal lives make volunteering less appealing and important. Associations as a whole have not done a good job of marketing and educating employers on the benefits of having their employees belong to an association and be involved as a volunteer. Associations will need to change their culture and the structure of how they traditionally approached volunteer work. They will have to stop asking volunteers to change their lives to meet the association’s work – and start changing the work to meet the realities of time that their members will be able to give as volunteers. To attract volunteers, the association work will need to be faster, focused, more flexible and enjoyable. Associations will also need to make much more use of technology (e.g., Web 2.0) to significantly reduce doing work via face to face meetings. As members’ wants and needs expand, and volunteerism declines, this will place added pressure on the association leadership to ensure that the organization is using its human resources in the most effective and efficient manner possible while continuing to grow funding sources to support proper resource allocation.
CORE IDEOLOGY
Stakeholders: The officers, directors, committee chairs, track chairs, and CESSE consultants, with ongoing input from the members, have the responsibility to build a consensus on the vision for the organization.
CESSE Major Objectives:
(1) Provide education opportunities to the members and
(2) Provide numerous and effective networking opportunities
Benchmarking Philosophy: One of the greatest assets of CESSE is the collective knowledge that resides in the member organizations. Through structured analysis and data collection techniques, CESSE will strive to bring out the knowledge from within its membership and disseminate throughout the scientific and engineering association community. The CESSE community is of significant size to allow valuable benchmarking from within but this will not prevent exclusion of other data and/or techniques as deemed valuable.
Organizational Structure – How Do We Get the Work Accomplished? The structure of CESSE is primarily the board of directors and the track chairs.There are sub-committees of the board that accomplish much of work. The responsibility of the board of directors is to continuously plan for the organization, set vision and goals, assign/charge committees, monitor progress, set policy, and communicate with the membership. In recent years, contract staff has been added in three areas and help facilitate work between meetings.
We need to expand our committee structure and bring others (both other CEO’s and senior staff) into involvement as active members of these committees to take on segments of the work. This should be done through a board driven committee structure for the organization.
Within CESSE there are four main types of groupings that allow activity to happen. They are Committees, Communities, Sections and Tracks. Each is briefly described below.
Committees are the highest level of organization with the most permanency to it. Committees are called out in the bylaws and created and terminated through direct action by the Board of Directors and/or membership of CESSSE.
Communities are self-organized collections of individuals with a common need. They easily and quickly emerge when a need is identified and are sunset with expediency when the need is met or disappears. The online Communities of Practice provide the organizational infrastructure to allow these to develop and terminate with demand from the membership.
Sections are a functioning body that evolves from active track participation but extends to needs that go beyond the programming responsibility of a track.
Tracks are created with the sole purpose of identifying conference programming for the CESSE annual meeting around a core competency practices by a subset of the membership.
ENVISIONED FUTURE
2010 Vision for 2015: The planning group created the following descriptions of what CESSE will look like in 2015:
- CESSE will provide Leadership Training Workshops, for volunteers: Our organizations feel obligated to help train the future leaders in our engineering and scientific professions. We, as CESSE member organizations, also hope to benefit from these leaders as they move into positions of leadership in our individual organization. CESSE will establish a program that will help us provide quality programs and create financial efficiencies through a coordinated effort. We will inquire from within membership as to who is already doing it and who has future plans.
- CESSE will excel at benchmark (survey and others, real time benchmarking) techniques
- Within boundaries and resources available CESSE will serve as a knowledge and networking resource for the best practices of the scientific and engineering association industry. Board liaisons to tracks will assist with this activity and request that tracks/sections/communities provide regular reports on activity and identified needs
- The 1st focus of CESSE is to serve CEOs and senior staff direct reports. We willexplore new ways for the tracks to enhance their programming and encourage migration to section status as a way of providing service to all staff.
- CESSE will encourage multiple educational forums culminating with a general annual meeting
- CESSE annual meeting will serve both specific discipline and strategic association leadership needs.
- CESSE will accumulate and make accessible a knowledge database for CESSE specific items leveraging the new e-communities, the CESSE group on LinkedIn, and other social media outlets.
- CESSE will utilize the resources available to CESSE via the vendors and the members themselves (intellectual and knowledge)
- There will be strong mutual relationships of a symbiotic nature between vendors and members. We will develop a powerful speed dating activity between CEOs (also meeting planners) and suppliers starting with events/meetings and eventually adding in evolving section content
- CESSE will have an effective governance structure that focuses on strategic issues. A standing board agenda item will be a review of progress with item discussion as necessary.
- 50 percent of the CESSE CEO’s will attend one of two CESSE meetings per year. It is essential that we provide enough value to warrant this level of participation from our members. We will target the CEOs not coming and set up a task team to contact them with one on one calls.
- The CESSE Website will facilitate the best possible communication, networking, and effectively represent CESSE and all CESSE activities.
GOALS AND OBJECTIVES
· Successful and vibrant communities within CESSE that may or may not be tied to track activity.
· Support of “Track Organization” by Board:
o The structure of the track organizations vary widely and should continue to grow organically
o We will provide an orientation session to conduct training and set expectations
o Some are highly organized with supporting positions, meetings and activities and have very active list serves and other means of virtual communities should be developed/available
o Other tracks have a single person with the primary goal of creating program content for the annual meeting
o One person Tracks should be encouraged to build supporting positions
o We will look at the number of parallel sessions versus number of attendees to keep interest levels high.
o We will look at extending the number of “joint track” sessions with a goal of driving up session attendance.
· Support the development of Sections from Tracks:
o Do not expect all Tracks to become Sections…CESSE focus will influence which program areas warrant this level of activity
o Emphasize that support for all program areas in association management is not a CESSE goal, as it is for ASAE
o The Board will maintain a dialogue with Sections and Tracks to determine the type of support that should be provided
· Enhanced web content through resource libraries in Communities of Practice
· Build Deputy Director Track
· Diversify Sponsorship Opportunities
· Sharing Best Practices and pitfalls on innovations/ideas and expand opportunities to do so
· Common policies and procedures – evolve to best practice
· Fully utilize profiles and demographics in CoP to provide a database with expertise listings
· Ambassador/buddy pairings for new members
· Member survey
· Make an increased effort to enhance member engagement
ASSESSMENT
Guiding Principles: The following principles were identified to reflect the Board’s thinking on some essential attributes that make CESSE a unique organization and were used to guide the planning decisions made at the 2010 retreat.
- Make no changes that put the CESSE culture of CEO collegiality, importance of volunteer involvement and focus on science and engineering at risk.
- Limit CESSE consultant support to administrative functions, letting program activities be a function of volunteer ability and willingness to develop content;
- Emphasize the importance of involvement as a distinct attribute of CESSE membership, with options for involvement in content development or participation in community (including virtual) networking;
[1] Taken from October 2009 Tecker & Associates piece titled “Association Futurescape.”
The CESSE Strategic Plan defines the CESSE Mission, Fundamental Values, Operating Principles, and Key Success Indicators. The two focus areas for strategic goals and strategies in the plan are: 1) Education of Members and 2) Networking.
All CESSE members are urged to become familiar with this plan, and to communicate with the CESSE Board and CESSE Committees regarding ideas for the future, and to volunteer to contribute to achieving the goals and implementing the strategies.
As an all-volunteer organization with no staff, the success of CESSE is dependent on the contributions from as many of its Senior and Associate members as possible.
CESSE Strategic Plan As of August 14, 2004
Mission
Share and examine successful approaches to managing engineering, scientific and technical societies while providing opportunities for networking and education of executives and senior staff of member societies.
Fundamental Values
CESSE is guided in the conduct of its affairs and activities by the following fundamental values:
- SERVICE: We serve the needs and utilize the resources of executives and senior staff of all engineering, scientific, and technical societies that meet the membership criteria as well as their suppliers; and we seek to increase the participation of individuals from underrepresented groups.
- VALUE: We provide value to members through unique focus on engineering and scientific societies.
- MEMBER DRIVEN: We are driven by knowledge of members' needs.
- INFORMALITY: We believe in maintaining informality in conducting business.
- OPENNESS: We provide guidance and share our experiences and expertise openly and freely.
Oragnization Key Success Indicators
- Increased satisfaction as measured by established indicators for each service.
- Increasing percentage of organizations participating in the offered services.
- Financial stability through achievement of budget objectives.
- Upward trend in the use of CESSE services.