I spent my lunch time on Thursday talking about SAA’s strategic plan with President elect Danna Russell and several members of council. Only a few other SAA members came and despite the low turn out we had a great discussion about key areas in the strategic plan. Most important to me is SAA’s objective: to develop a plan for building on SAA’s progress in achieving greater diversity in membership and in leadership positions.
I hope to see programming at future meetings that focus on leadership- not just management practice- but developing leadership skills within our profession. We discussed developing a mid- career mentoring program to encourage leadership training at all phases of one’s career.
We also talked about how SAA communicates with it’s members. For example, I find SAA’s governing structure a bit mysterious. I now know that anyone can go to the council meetings that typically take place on the Monday and Tuesday of the conference. While that information was in the program, it was under the title of “New members, first timers and students” so I didn’t see it, because I don’t fit into one of the those categories.
We talked about how the organization disseminates information during the year. While I confessed that I don’t read the President’s blog, I do carefully read through In the Loop.
SAA will never be all things to all of its members, but I hope that as we all get more comfortable with reaching our target audiences through social media, that we can employ these tools to become better connected as a profession.