Ed’s speach given to the delegates of the CSAE
Association, was elected Chair of the Canadian Society of Association Executives on September 17 at the CSAE National Conference & Showcase in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
Ed holds a Certified Association Executive (CAE) designation from the CSAE in addition to degrees from the Universite de Montreal and McGill University. Barisa has served the society as Vice-Chair and Secretary Treasurer as well on a variety of volunteer committees over the years.
In 2007, he received CSAE’s Pinnacle Award in recognition of exceptional leadership and outstanding contribution to the association community and to the Canadian Society of Association Executives.
The following is an excerpt of his speech at the Honours and Awards Luncheon on Saturday, September 17, 2011.
Ladies and gentlemen, It is a great honour to be elected as Chair of CSAE.
J’aimerais tout d’abord remercier mes collègues sur le Conseil d’administration pour leur vote de confiance. And I want to thank my wife Joe-ann without whose help, guidance and understanding, I would not be standing here today.
I know that I will never be able to give back to CSAE as much as I have received. That is what makes CSAE so great. Over the years I have heard so many wonderful stories from you about what CSAE membership has meant to you, how it has advanced your career, gotten you out of a jam, gotten you business and sometimes just provided you with someone to commiserate with, someone who understands what you do.
We conducted a lot of research, spoke to a lot of people, looked at what our members value most and we realized that knowledge is what they are primarily after, that knowledge was and is CSAE’s unique value proposition.
CSAE’s currency is knowledge. The Board of Directors has taken significant steps to bolster CSAE’s knowledge management capacity. I hope all of you have been visiting our newly re-vamped website. We have also had to transform our database so that we can extract information more easily about members’ wants and needs.
We developed certificate level courses to expand our offerings to those who work in associations and need practical knowledge “right now.” We are revising the CAE® program to bring it up-to-date. All of these “infrastructure” changes have taken a lot of effort both on the volunteer side as well as from staff and a lot of money – so why did we do it?
The answer is because we had no choice. Nous n’avions pas le choix. Tout change si rapidement autour de nous qu’on a du renouveller notre infrastructure interne pour nous permettre de changer avec souplesse. Organizations who fail to adapt, who do not keep up, become road kill.
Change is always a difficult proposition. In times of stability, we can get by with incremental improvements to keep our members happy, to keep our membership numbers up. Times of instability require transformational change to create new demand. We have begun this transformational change by putting down a solid foundation with our infrastructure renewal initiatives.
That was the easy part – now we will have to address the scary part, the transformation that our association requires for it to attract and involve tomorrow’s association leaders. They do not attend traditional meetings, they text and tweet each other across the same room even when they do meet. They are used to dealing with incredibly powerful CRMs in their purchasing experience and if their association won’t deliver the same experience they will click off and go somewhere else.
Look around you and you won’t see too many people in this room who would be “carded” in a bar.
Many of us are working on succession planning in our own associations and the CSAE needs to do it also – as an association. Younger entrants to association management are our future. We need to find out who they are, we need to find out what their needs are; we need to develop new and innovative ways of engaging them. We need to give them a voice, give them opportunities to connect with each other and provide them with services to address their unique needs.
So where do you come in? To the association executives in the room, I ask you to encourage your staff to get involved, convince your boards of directors to double the number of your association’s CSAE members, take one of your staff along to an event, get them engaged. Keeping our Association vibrant is not only Michael’s job, and not just the CSAE Board of Directors job. It is up to each and every one of us. When I started at OREA ten years ago, we had two CSAE members on staff, one with a CAE designation. Today we have nine CSAE members on staff, seven of whom have their CAE designations. I know it can be done.
CSAE has made it easier and less expensive through its organization pricing model, yet another infrastructure innovation to help us get more of our colleagues involved in CSAE at a national and Chapter level.
I realize not all of you can give up the sort of time that Bob Ramsay, Sandi Humphrey, George Weber, Claude-Paul Boivin, Signe Holstein, Martin Copeland and others have given to CSAE over the years. But I do know that each and every one of you can do more. I am asking for your help, continued involvement and commitment.
Thank you.
