Issue link: https://industrialengineer.epubxp.com/i/920036
30 ISE Magazine | www.iise.org/ISEmagazine Re-engineering an IISE chapter 4. Improve integration with our student chapters, the regional conferences and The Ohio State University ISE leadership summit. 5. Create more effective offerings that people want but can't easily create for themselves. 6. Community service 7. Conversion campaigns 8. Convert 999s (IISE members unaffiliated with any chapter) to our chapter. 9. Experiment with virtual membership meetings and calls. 10. Hold at least four successful webinars in 2017. Then came the part we like to call "do, study, adjust." Within a month we started doing things and landed some of- fer elements that we thought would help establish a presence with our declining membership. We launched our monthly memos. We used MailChimp to conduct analytics on open rates and kickback rates on contact addresses. This probably was our most pronounced and consistent val- ue exchange offering for the first three to five months. By including member pro- files and pages on how to get to know your members, we established a line of communication to engage our audience and help them learn about their peers. We realized that being able to mea- sure and evaluate how our value ex- change experiments did was important to sustaining success. So, basically from scratch, we created the data model and database at the chapter level so we could mine data and gain insights about what was working, what wasn't and why. IISE has a good and improving member da- tabase. However, like most organizations, we were data rich and information poor. Data were not being analyzed to sup- port improvement. One of our early initiatives tapped into Ohio State ISE undergrads and our student chapter. We harnessed their talent to help us develop an Access database, organize our data and structure it better. This allowed us to know where our members work and live, which supported planning for face- to-face events; know which divisions and societies they are in, which gave us insight into their interests; and in some cases deduce their age, which helped us gauge their likely career stage. A critical component in optimizing a value exchange process or system is a way to understand the unmet and unfulfilled needs of members, or the voice of the members. It's important for chapters to understand who their members are and what they expect or want for their an- nual dues. So we used GoToMeeting for small group conference calls organized by geographical proximity. We had a call for our northeast Ohio members, the old Cleveland chapter; then our Akron/ Canton area members; and then Colum- bus, or central Ohio. Limiting invites to 22 or less yielded six to 12 participants, which was fine. Conversations were super as we shared our vision, plans and offerings, followed by asking our "customers" what we weren't doing that would add value – webinar topics, specifically. We're get- ting ready for our second round of mem- ber calls in the next two to three months. These calls helped us understand wheth- er the offer elements we thought would work actually were valued. Looking beyond geography Positioning, as discussed, is one way to grow franchise value. You can alter what you offer (i.e., adding monthly memos and webinars), but you also can expand your service area. At the dawn of the Columbus chapter transformation, about 36 members in Cleveland were classified as "999," or member at large, not part of a formal chapter. So we expanded our thinking in terms of geographic cover- age and embraced the Cleveland and the Akron/Canton members, adding two segment owners in the Cleveland area to address the needs of northeastern Ohio and manage relationships there. Additional positioning involved imagining us as a virtual chapter. About 20 Ohio State alumni who don't live in Ohio are now members of Chapter 1 (notice we didn't say the Columbus chapter). Our vision and our offer is to welcome graduates of Ohio University, Ohio State or Youngstown State (the Motivating the moribund Professional and university chapters are the lifeblood of IISE, the veins through which the energy of the institute course. Some chapters remain stable, while others fluctuate and even disappear before rising again (which is why IISE gives out a Phoenix Award every year). If you have taken the time to read this article, IISE would like you to share your innovations, thoughts, reactions and ideas. What has worked to transform the Columbus professional chapter could work elsewhere, but other chapters are doing great work also. Chapter 1 has a community site set up, and you can chat with members there (https://connect.iise.org/mycommunities). Or e-mail D. Scott Sink at sink.22@osu.edu. IISE Chapter 1's website is http://www.iiecolumbus.org, and you can peruse the group's latest events, past events and monthly memos. And as the main article mentions, some things in Chapter 1's transformation still need help. Applying the wisdom of the IISE crowd could add value to successful chapters, breathe new oxygen into inactive units and resurrect those that have perished. Perhaps your group could win the Phoenix Award for 2018 (for more on that award, see http://www.iise.org/details.aspx?id=1416).