 |
2011 Leadership Summit |
Welcome back to Washington, D.C. Are you ready to party again?
The last time we met in this city, at the 2009 Annual Conference, SLA was celebrating the 100th anniversary of its founding. More than 5,000 information and knowledge professionals converged on Washington for four days of learning, networking, socializing, and reveling in each other's company. It was a great time to be an SLA member, and in the joy and excitement of the occasion, it was easy to forget that a global recession was beginning to cast a pall over the information landscape.
The past 18 months have been like a hangover from that party. Many information and knowledge professionals have lost their jobs, and the employment picture, though improving, is still bleak. Our 2010 conference in New Orleans, while rated highly by attendees, did not draw as well as we had hoped. And our membership level, which had stood at roughly 10,900 in January 2009, dropped to about 9,700 in January 2010 and is now at 9,380.
But the last few months have brought some news that even the most hardened or jaded among us would admit is cause for cautious optimism. First, attendance at this week's Leadership Summit is on par with last year, an encouraging sign given the economy and the travel difficulties caused by the weather.
In addition, more than 200 people took advantage of a special offer starting last June to register for the 2011 Annual Conference in Philadelphia. That's 200 attendees already in the books, before registration formally opens later this month.
And we have reorganized and refocused SLA staff, which I'll say more about later, to place a greater emphasis on aligning our activities to support core association objectives.
These developments portend an improvement in our budget as well. For 2010, we had forecast a $74,000 budget deficit, but with membership and the conference both suffering the effects of the recession, we missed that target and fell deeper into the red. This year, as our treasurer, Dan Trefethen, noted earlier this morning, we budgeted more conservatively from the outset--and if these early trends hold, we plan to more than break even on our revenues and expenses.
As I look around this room, I see more cause for optimism--dozens of dedicated and talented volunteers. You are the backbone of SLA. Before I go any further, I want to recognize some of you.
First, let me say thanks to the many members of the Washington, D.C. Chapter for their help in hosting this Leadership Summit. Would all of the chapter members who are here today please rise? And could I also ask Cindy Romaine, Liz Blankson-Hemans, Mary Ellen Bates, Ruth Wolfish, Ann Sweeney, Ulla de Stricker, Richard Huffine, Tom Rink and Susan Fifer Canby, who planned this summit, to rise as well?
These folks are just the tip of the iceberg. I know there are several others who have helped make this event a success, but couldn't be here today.
Thank you all for your hard work on behalf of SLA, and please share my appreciation with others who have helped support this meeting
I also want to recognize our Gold sponsor, Dow Jones & Company, and our Thursday refreshment break sponsor, ProQuest and Dialog, and our exhibitors who are here with us this week. Their support allows us to keep registration fees as low as possible and provide a strong program for SLA's current and future leaders. I encourage all attendees, and especially our board members, to visit with them during refreshment breaks and as time permits.
And speaking of our board members--I want to recognize all of the board members here today and especially our new members who took office on January 1st: Bent Mai, Ulla de Stricker, Richard Huffine, Jill Hurst-Wahl, and Sara Tompson. I know I speak for every SLA member when I say that I appreciate their commitment to this association and to their fellow information and knowledge professionals. I know they will bring valuable skills and perspectives to the leadership of SLA, and I look forward to working with them.
When I say I look forward to working with them, the operative word is working--and believe me, we have a lot of work to do. First and foremost, we have to help make our members "future ready," as Cindy Romaine has pledged to do this year.
This means building on the lasting and valuable lessons of the Alignment Project by rolling out new tools, which board member Mary Ellen Bates will describe in more detail this afternoon. It means providing our members with must-attend educational and networking opportunities through ClickU, our annual conference, chapter and division programs and services, and social media outlets. It means offering thought-provoking articles in our magazine, Information Outlook, and sharing success stories on our blogs. And it means exposing members to fresh perspectives from people outside our profession, as Susan Robertson of the American Society of Association Executives will do tomorrow morning in her presentation on building community.
You know, "community" is an awkward word to use here in Washington. We like to talk in this city about bipartisanship, about Democrats and Republicans working together for the common good, yet we all know that gridlock and partisanship are the norm even in the best of times. But in tribute to this year's conference site, Philadelphia, the "city of brotherly love," we in SLA are going to focus this year on strengthening our community of information and knowledge professionals.
Like so much else that we're doing, nurturing our community means creating virtual opportunities for engagement as well as physical opportunities. I'm pleased to say that our early efforts in this area are already bearing fruit. For example, we recently established a central SLA profile on LinkedIn to serve as a gathering place for info pros who use that networking service. Several SLA profiles had already existed on LinkedIn, but we deactivated them and positioned the remaining profile, which originally had been created by our own Richard Huffine, as a "community room" for our profession.
The result? We are now linked to roughly 3,500 information and knowledge professionals, and more are linking to us every day. If your chapter or division has a LinkedIn presence, please let us know so we can link to it as well.
But the story doesn't end there. Within our LinkedIn profile we've set up eight virtual gathering places for chapters and divisions to host discussions, and we've activated RSS feeds to pick up the latest postings on our blogs and our Career Center. This drives more traffic to our blogs and to the Career Center, providing both job seekers and employers with more value. We've also created a "Future Ready Begins Today" group, where contributors to the Future Ready 365 blog can share ideas.
On FaceBook, we've created a central "fan page" to allow other FaceBook members to post news, photos, videos, and ideas and engage in discussions, all in a central location. We've eliminated the event-specific FaceBook pages we previously hosted and instead have created pages for the Leadership Summit and SLA 2011 within our main fan site. We've also set up feeds from the SLA blogs, including the Future Ready 365 blog, so all new posts to those blogs are auto-posted to our FaceBook wall and our fans can share these posts with their own FaceBook communities.
These and other steps we are taking to promote community have important secondary benefits. First, they allow us to identify and follow up with potential new members--in fact, several of the people who have linked to us or become fans have joined SLA. Also, they enable us to promote our products and services, such as SLA 2011, to a wider audience. And they drive more traffic to our Website, thereby raising awareness of our association and its mission.
Speaking of Websites, we are now in the pilot phase of an effort to host and standardize unit sites. This will permit all SLA chapters, divisions, and caucuses to have Web presences that feature a consistent look and feel yet are flexible, user-friendly, and, best of all, inexpensive--only $40 per year for each unit, which translates to $3.33 each month! This effort was spearheaded by a board member, Daniel Lee, who will tell us more about the project this afternoon at 4:30.
Daniel, I cannot say enough about your contribution to this important initiative. Thank you so much for your time, your dedication, and your commitment to SLA.
As I mentioned, this project is in its pilot phase. At last count, 17 SLA units are testing their new Websites and will report back to us with their experiences. We hope to have all SLA units on board by the end of 2011.
As we upgrade our unit sites, we'll be doing the same with sla.org, the virtual "face" of our community. In the months ahead, several SLA staff will be working with Stephen Abram and some of his colleagues at Gale Cengage to redesign sla.org. We are fortunate that Gale Cengage has agreed to partner with SLA to make this happen, and I want to thank Stephen for his hard work in making the necessary arrangements. Stephen, please rise and take a well-deserved bow.
The emphasis of this Website redesign will be on making it easier for information and knowledge professionals to renew their SLA membership, register for meetings and Webinars, read and comment on magazine articles, participate in chapters and divisions, demonstrate their value to their employers and co-workers, network with their peers--all tasks and activities that are central to SLA's value proposition. If we want to grow our community, we must not only provide professional development and networking opportunities, we must make it easy to take advantage of those opportunities. The redesign of sla.org will be a giant step forward in that direction.
Another emphasis of this redesign will be sustainability--that is, making it possible for SLA staff to update information on the Website and keep it looking fresh without hiring outside vendors. This will enable us to maintain the site at little or no cost and with minimal staff involvement, thereby allowing us to focus our resources on other programs and services that are more labor- and cost-intensive.
Sustainability, like community, is another word that does not wear well in Washington. With control of Congress and the White House changing hands every few years, initiatives that are popular one year can be cut back or even eliminated the next year. The only constant, it seems, is money. There's always more where it came from--or at least our politicians act like there is. Unfortunately, that is not the case with SLA.
As I mentioned earlier, the recession has taken a toll on information and knowledge professionals. Countless members have lost their jobs and seen their information centers shuttered, while others have had their salaries frozen or reduced. Although we were able to retain most of our members, we have experienced a reduction in dues income, which has been exacerbated by drops in non-dues revenue from advertising and sponsorship sales and conference registrations. All of this has put pressure on our operations, and staff have borne the brunt of the financial squeeze.
In the past 18 months, we have eliminated or not filled nearly a dozen staff positions--that's roughly 40 percent of our workforce. We did hire replacements for a few key staff members who departed, but the bottom line is that today we have only 17 full-time and one temporary staff positions, down from 28 full-time positions when we held our 2009 conference here in Washington. Those who have stayed at SLA have not received raises for the past two years and are receiving only minimal increases this year; they have also begun paying a significant portion of their health insurance costs, which SLA covered entirely through 2007. In effect, staff have been taking pay cuts over the past few years.
As our staff shrank in size, it quickly become evident to us that we could not continue to do business as we had in the past and still maintain the level of service our members expect from us. Simply working more or working harder would not suffice--after all, we, like you, are being challenged to not only do more with less but do different with less. We are serving not just individual members, but a community--actually, many communities--and this is requiring us to use new skills and take new approaches to our work.
We held several brainstorming sessions at SLA headquarters to identify which programs and services we should continue providing, which ones we could eliminate, and which we could add if we could do so within my goal of a balanced budget in 2011. Driving our decisions was an overarching belief that the value of SLA membership lies in two main areas: professional development and networking. Another driver was the goal of recruiting new members to replace those who are retiring or leaving the profession and to bring fresh perspectives and energy into our association.
Several staff were given new duties to fill voids left by departed staff members, but in each case we also eliminated some duties that we deemed unnecessary. For example, we no longer have a staff member assigned to SLA-TV because we decided we could not justify having our own video network when other, less expensive options, such as YouTube, are available. Even in situations where we maintained existing programs, we tried to identify ways we could provide an equal or improved level of service at less cost. We did this successfully with our Webinars by finding a different vendor to host the sessions, which saved us approximately $40,000 a year.
The end result of this brainstorming and shuffling of staff and duties is this: You are getting more today from your SLA membership dollar than ever before. As an SLA member, you are part of a community--one that offers you access both to those who share your specific interests and experiences as well as to those who can enrich your understanding of the information profession precisely because their interests and experiences are so different from yours. By joining SLA you become part of something bigger, an ecosystem if you will, that includes all the members of SLA plus the members of other library and information organizations, the information industry, and even your employers and your colleagues in other departments.
In fact, your employers and colleagues are some of the most important reasons you benefit from SLA membership. The Alignment Project included survey results, interviews and focus groups with executives, human resources professionals, information technology professionals, and marketing and strategy specialists to assess their information needs and habits. The feedback gained from these techniques can help you align your knowledge and expertise with the mission and goals of your organization, provide value-added intelligence to organization leaders, and determine the most valuable roles you can play in your organization.
I urge you to pay close attention to Mary Ellen Bates this afternoon as she discusses some of the tools that a task force has been developing using the Alignment research. The Alignment research is sustainable--there's that word again--because it provides guidance on how you can position yourself to maximize your contributions to your organization, both today and in the future. That alone is worth the price of SLA membership, yet it is just one of the many benefits you receive from being part of the SLA community.
I also urge you to do three other things that will benefit you, and benefit SLA as well. First, make plans now (if you haven't already) to attend SLA 2011 in Philadelphia, and encourage others in your library, your chapter and your division to meet you there. In addition to educational sessions, networking and socializing events, opportunities to meet with vendors, and renowned keynote speakers--such as Thomas Friedman, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner who writes a column for the New York Times--SLA 2011 will offer forums for business leaders to meet with information and knowledge professionals to learn more about the services they provide and the value they can add. In your spare time, you can enjoy the sights and sounds of Philadelphia, a modern and world-class city that is also a showcase of U.S. history.
Registration for SLA 2011 will open later this month. The sooner you sign up, the more value you'll get for your money.
Second, ask your colleagues to join SLA. I know that in some libraries and information centers, one person will join SLA, another will join a different library association, and yet another will join a third group. But ask yourself this: Are you interested in quantity, or quality? Can you, by yourself, take full advantage of all that SLA has to offer, or would it help to have a colleague join SLA and attend conference sessions, engage in social media opportunities, and participate in chapter and division activities that you can't? And would your colleagues be more likely to further their professional development and make valuable contacts through SLA or through another association?
You and I already know the answers to these questions. That party we held here in 2009 was more than just a 100th anniversary--it was living, breathing, learning, and networking proof that SLA has value, that it provides benefits no other organization can provide. So tell your colleagues why SLA matters to you, and why it should matter to them, too.
Finally, I want you to talk about your value at work. I know this is not an easy thing for some of you to do. Many people are reluctant to toot their own horn, and information and knowledge professionals historically have worked in environments that value quiet reflection and discourage discourse. But if you don't talk about what you add to your organization, who will? And if you don't let your managers and colleagues know what you can do for them, how can you blame them if they fail to understand why they need an information professional in the first place?
If you absolutely cannot bring yourself to talk about your value, let me suggest another approach: talk about the value of someone else in your organization, someone who has impressed you with his or her contributions or who has provided great service to you. Chances are, that person will want to return the favor. If so, you will have achieved your goal without saying a word about yourself.
Now that I have asked some things of you, you are welcome to ask questions of me. But before I open the floor, let me ask all of the SLA staff members in attendance to please stand and be recognized. They are here to support this meeting and get better acquainted with the members they serve, and they have worked especially hard over the past few months to ensure that SLA continues to be the leading community of information and knowledge professionals. I hope you will take a few minutes to say hello and get to know them.
Thank you.
RSS
Feedback form
