OpCom Report from Large Section session.

Large Section Discussion

What helps make your section successful?

• Phoenix Section Chair Bruce Ladewig: Success is from affinity groups and chapters, not the excom.  Those groups are passionate, lots of energy, lots fundraising.  Had golf tournament, active with student chapters.  Tend to be more innovative.  Once got the students involved, they started running things themselves.  But need good faculty advisor support.
• Central Texas Section Past Chair – Kenny Rice Has excellent leadership in the excom, almost all past section chairs.  He does a lot of conferences, sponsors chapter chairs to conferences, with chair to try to bring a conference back to Austin.  They have goal of 20% of surplus.  They provide leadership team for conference, mostly central Texas, so offer large group of experienced people.  Lot of workshops at conferences, good funding source.  If section pays for someone to go to conference, they are required to write article for newsletter.
• Central Texas Section Past Chair Joe Redfield– Has student branch coordinator, very involved with students.  Uses section funding to get them engaged.  Students are heavily subsidized by the section.  …
• Central Texas Section Past Chair John Purvis – Chapters are very spread out, so have separate meetings.  Most societies meet once per month.  Have 5 universities, but not heavily tied to academics.  Successful because large number of meetings.  Electronic newsletter goes out with all the meetings for the month, heavily dependent on vtools, makes it much easier to build newsletter, just pulls from vtools.
• IEEE-USA President-Elect Karen Pederson – Sends email with meetings, local IEEE info, to all new members.  Works on having a lot of offering to members meetings for engineers, works on offering continuing education credits.
• Chicago Section Chair David Richardson – Have symposiums, makes good surplus mostly through attendance fees and vendors.  Successful ones have a lot of students.  Lots of classes, multiple venues, hackathon.  Didn’t charge for hackathon, corporate sponsored.  Student $25, member $35 ahead, $40 at door, $50 non-member.  Used to be $100 per member, got more successful as brought price down.  Ex: last one 144 people, 80% students.
• Santa Clara Valley Section Chair Joe Wei – Talked about differences between managing volunteers vs paid.  15K members, 40 operating units.  Helps having very experienced leadership.  38 chapters, lots of activities.  Using gmail, google drive, to manage reporting.  Friday before excom, officers must post their report.  Excom is 2 hours only, anyone on agenda has to submit something first.  Meet first wed of each month, and attempt to strictly keep people to their time.  Has excom group that rotates each year to prevent burning them out.  Has student coordinator that all engineering sciences are under, so good teaching opportunities.  Has marketing communication chair, does twitter, Facebook.  Consolidated all STEM activity under one chair, and the person presents to excom, so this is very efficient.
• Santa Clara Valley Section Secretary Ed Aoki – – Has $2000 set aside for each student section and the section had to report to excom their activities, funding sources, etc.  Subsidy encourages their participation.  Require before they are funded, that they submit their student activities report to the bigger IEEE, so as to increase the section’s funding and statistics.  Goal is to get easy money.  Secretary role is important, since they need to have good communication and access between all the rolls.  If officer reporting is not done properly and on time, SAMIEEE is incorrect, and there is activity but no reporting.  Note do not put Dec 31 as end of term, since all the officers will drop off beginning of January, before new ones are assigned.  They use SAMIEEE query extensively.What would they like to change or improve?
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• Bruce – Have too many open positions. Need full roster that is working to their goals.
• Joe – student branches, engage them more in early spring to encourage them to continue their membership.
• Someone mentioned electronic newsletter, need to ask members what is best way facebook, email, etc, and because student social media needs are different than older engineers. Because symposium was so popular with students, want student-specific symposium.  Also need more volunteers to run for section officer roles.
• Ed Aoki – Long term financial planning, need to have a better financial base for longer range planning. Wants Net suite, bank reports improvements.  Need to map CB data into Net suite to make financial reporting easier.
• Upkar – San Diego Section – Revitalization needs to be a bigger goal.  Tries to bring in more new people, new blood, new ideas, toward this goal.