Board members, coordinators and volunteers met on Saturday, June 11, at our boardroom location at Vancity in East Vancouver for the chapter’s annual strategic planning meeting.
I presented what I see as major themes for the year – Focus, Communicate, Engage, and Share. I will expand on these themes in a post coming a little later this month.
We spent most of the session discussing and evaluating possible projects for the coming year.
Projects that we’re considering include:
Website re-design: The chapter’s website, done in WordPress, is more than three years old and ready for a re-design. We can quite easily switch to a new theme and add more visual interest to the site – and the home page in particular – with photos of Vancouver, board members and volunteers, and chapter events. We can increase the educational content of the website by writing and commissioning more articles about tech writing skills and tools.
Scholarships: The chapter has run a scholarship program in the past, but it has been a challenge to get the word out and receive and evaluate applications. We discussed an alternative – subsidizing memberships for members of five or more years, or subsidizing student memberships for student in technical writing programs at schools like SFU, BCIT and VCC.
Program schedule: We can increase the number of presentations to six from four last year. Presentations in the coming year could include: recent STC award winners, a workshop format where three tech writers present case studies, and presentations from IT companies with a prominent local presence, like Microsoft, Boeing, and Hootsuite.
LinkedIn: We discussing changing our LinkedIn presence from a group to a full corporate page with info about the chapter, cross posts from the website, and specific LinkedIn content.
Canada salary survey: The STC mothership in Virginia releases a salary survey every year but does not include Canadian data. We could collaborate with the other Canadian chapters (Alberta, Manitoba, Toronto, and Southwest Ontario) to do a salary survey of our own.
Volunteer handbook: We can create a document for volunteers that explains how the chapter works, along with the duties, responsibilities and value of volunteering.
Leadership initiative: This program provides free tuition for a post-secondary leadership course for a chapter volunteer and was launched in the spring by Past President Mala Rupnarain. We need to get the word out so all chapter members know about it.
I’ll have more details on the timing and scale of these projects and programs after our July 16th online meeting. Join us and add your two cents – send me an email (president[at]stcwestcoast.ca) and I’ll send you the JoinMe link to the meeting.
All of these projects are designed to provide useful, engaging and educational information for our members. That’s why we’re here. But to make them happen – and to make them truly succeed as chapter projects and events – we need your support. Attend an event. Or come and volunteer. You’ll learn a lot.
Stephen is a senior technical writer with more than 20 years experience writing for corporate and hi-tech clients in Vancouver and Toronto. He is the past president of the STC Canada West Coast chapter.