PASS Board Year End Summary

Rushabh Mehta recently posted a blog entry that helps to describe how the PASS Board members have operated in the past with regards to portfolio assignments. After reading his post it occurred to me that I should do a year end summary for my involvement on the PASS Board of Directors.

Last December I was asked by Wayne Snyder if I would be willing to serve a one year appointment to fill a vacant seat on the PASS Board. I accepted and was handed the SIG portfolio and instructed to “do something with this” (my words, not theirs). The rough outline I was given was to get the SIG to a point where they could be transitioned into either the Chapter portfolio or into the Virtual Community portfolio.

With help from Blythe Morrow a plan was born where we would rebrand the SIGs as Virtual Chapters and transition oversight to a new portfolio by the end of June. Since June never happened in 2009 we missed out on achieving that part of our plan. But we nailed everything else.

That was essentially the only official task I was handed for 2009. Since I was sitting in for the one year appointment and no one knew if I was going to be elected in the Fall, I am not certain that people were looking to dump a lot of items in my lap. I tried to help others where I could and expressed interest in trying to get a portfolio dedicated to membership started again. But there is a slight shift going on with regards to how PASS Board members are going to be assigned work. Rushabh tries to explain in more detail but I will give you the abridged version:

We are moving away from portfolios and more towards strategic assignments.

Rushabh talked with me for about an hour regarding what I want to do for PASS during the next two years. I told him the same things I said at PASS in November. My top priority is to grow the Summit, which aligns with the overall goals of PASS at this time (grow chapters, grow membership, grow conference). I want to grow the Summit well beyond the 2k attendees. I don’t know how to get that job done yet, but I do know that I want to try. That is my passion right now.

The way I see things we have three areas to improve upon for the Summit. These are my opinions that I am sharing with you and not something handed down to me at this time:

1. Improve our customer retention. We had about 40% of the attendees respond that this was their first conference. That is about 800 people. It is my goal that this percentage declines steadily with each passing year. Getting new people is great, but we need to find ways to make certain they come back year after year. I want 800 new people to be 10% of our total (or less).
2. Improve the customer experience. My guess is that if we improve the customer experience then we improve the customer retention. There are a lot of people that come to PASS knowing zero (0) other people, and they leave PASS without meeting anyone else as well. We need to make certain that everyone at PASS interacts with someone else so that they are more inclined to want to return.
3. Improve our profit margins. I don’t have the exact numbers with me so I will use hypothetical numbers to explain what I mean. Let’s say that at this year’s conference we made a profit of $100 per attendee. I want to find ways to increase that net amount. It seems that each year the Summit is not only our biggest revenue generator but also our biggest expense. PASS is not a wealthy organization by any measuring stick and every dime we earn we look to invest back into the community. Operating a Summit and hoping that we break even is not the business model I want us to continue to have in five or ten years. I want to see something that is able to generate more revenue (and also have PASS find additional revenue streams outside of the Summit).

So, how do I plan on getting this done? I have no idea, really. Except that I know I will need help. So plan on me reaching out to you at some point for some help. See, I may have some ideas in my head but I am only one person, who was elected to represent thousands of others. So I need you to help me understand the ideas that we all feel will work best.

Here is what I have in mind so far.

1. Create “PASS-talk”, an online broadcast where Board members interact with the community. We answer questions. We listen to concerns. We float ideas and get some response back from the community. In other words, we stop doing most of our work in a vacuum behind closed doors and we find ways to get more of it done in a collaboration. The last few hours I had in Seattle this year I floated ten ideas around with about fifty people in order to get a sense of what will and will not work best in the coming year. Now, imagine if all the Board members did that exact same thing on a regular basis through UStream? Did you imagine it? Did it look like bacon?
2. Create a “Big Bother / Big Sister” type of program at the Summit for new attendees. We know who the new people are, we can even find them by giving them a badge to wear if they want to be recognized. But when they register we can go one step further and assign them to a volunteer that will arrange to meet with them during the Welcome Reception. It is a similar idea to the types of Orientation Committee that many colleges do. We get a group of say six new people, get them to talk with each other, and have the volunteer help them to meet others. Got a question about DBCC commands? There’s Paul Randal, let me introduce you.
3. Help locate volunteers to head up new Virtual Chapters dedicated to specific industries such as Healthcare or Finance. In addition to all the technical VCs we have (as well as the Professional Development VC), it would be great if we had some community members that wanted to launch a VC that would be specific to an industry. That way we could have industry professionals (not just SQL professionals) become more familiar with our community and hopefully entice them to join in on the conversations.

That’s all I have for now in my mind. There are some smaller ideas I have as well, but I am going to try to focus on only 2-3 items in the coming year. Any more and I may lose focus on one or more which would be a disservice to those projects. So if something new comes up then I will just reorganize what is on my plate at that time and do my best to keep my focus on only a few items and not on everything under the Sun.

In the next few weeks I expect that Rushabh and I will be talking again only this time he will be handing me specific assignments to help drive PASS forward. I do not know if he will be handing me a portfolio assignment or not, but I do know he is going to be handing me something! And chances are it is going to align closely with where my passion currently lies: growing the Summit.