Austin AITP July 1998 Monthly Meeting
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The AITP Wake-up Call
The AITP Wake-up Call
Hello AITP Leaders,
I am looking forward to seeing everyone in Winter Park next week!
As a prelude to this meeting, I would like to share some information with you through a series of emails over the next two weeks. We have made some changes here in Austin over the last year, and the results have been staggering. Let me share a few highlights with you:
- We have doubled our membership in eight months. Our new member sign-up rate continues on an upward curve.
- We now have a regular meeting attendance of 50. We have had one meeting with 110. We expect this number to continue growing.
- Civic Pride, the premier corporate networking publication in Austin, recently highlighted us in their newsletter to 3,000 technology professionals with this statement:
"This may be the hottest organization town... they are growing by leaps and bounds."- We have had over 600 IT professionals subscribed to our monthly announcement. We are receiving 10 subscribe requests per week.
- We are regularly hosting national caliber speakers.
- We were recently highlighted in an article in the Austin American-Statesman as one of the city's top five high tech networking opportunities.
I still can't believe it! We are all thrilled to be implementing a formula which truly appears to be working for our chapter.
Now I'm going to let you in on a well kept secret.
Twelve short months ago, our current Chapter President, Steve Adair sent the following letter to our Chapter Liaison, Wanda Euwer. The letter was subsequently sent to the full Austin AITP membership. I admire Steve's courage and brilliance in sending us this letter. I still read it from time to time to remind myself where our chapter stood at this time last year.
Here it is:
To: Wanda Euwer, Austin AITP Chapter Liaison
From: Steve Adair, Austin AITP PresidentAugust 20,1997
Dear Wanda:
As you know, our membership has been in steady decline for the last couple of years. The attendance at the monthly chapter meetings has dwindled to the point that we canceled the August meeting. At this point there is only one person willing to serve as an officer in 1998. The board of directors has made every effort to make membership in the Austin chapter of AITP worthwhile, but it is painfully obvious that the chapter is not meeting the needs of the current membership.
This letter is the last call to salvage the chapter. If I do not have any positive response, we will disband the chapter.
If you have any questions or comments, please give me a call.
Sincerely,
Steven Adair
Austin AITP PresidentSobering isn't it? It hit many of us right between the eyes. Steve was asking if it was really important to us, the AITP members, to have an organization like AITP exist in our city. If it was - what did we really want?
Sadly, this is an all too familiar story across the national AITP organization.
Well - We didn't give up. But being against the ropes gave us the opportunity we needed to be creative. We broke the mold and rebuilt our chapter to be an organization which fits both the city of Austin and the 1990s.
Our work is not finished - we still have a long way to go. But I can tell you that we are all breathing easier here at Austin AITP. The whole situation makes a great case study worth communicating.
I look forward to sharing some of our key changes, and our ideas, with all of you in this series of short emails. I will also post some of these in the AITP "Members Only" Forum for further discussion.
More to come ...
