UFI MD Paul Woodward on discovering and reaching your audience.
For any organisation, large or small, efficient and effective communication is a challenge. Our global audience becomes one of our biggest challenges when it comes to getting our message to all corners of the world. Helping UFI’s members to better understand what is happening around the organisation and to coordinate our efforts to support and promote the industry is very high on my list of priorities.
I was particularly pleased, therefore, that four of the chairs of our five working committees were able to join the UFI executive committee when it met in Paris in mid-September. The operations, marketing, ICT, education and sustainable development committees are the point within UFI where some of our most active and engaged members meet to help develop the programmes and discuss issues which have direct impact on the day-to-day business of our industry.
Because of the way they work, the committee chairs don’t meet each other very often nor the other volunteers who lead UFI’s governing bodies. So the Paris meeting was a rare opportunity to exchange notes for all those who put their time into making your association work.
It was striking to me how many common themes emerged from the various presentations of the chairs. They are very focused on how best to identify members’ needs. They all work a lot to help make the focus meetings and award programmes as relevant as possible. At the same time, they all face challenges on how to renew each committee’s membership.
Participants really need to be active and involved in order to make these groups work. Our global membership makes this particularly challenging, as all agree that virtual and electronic communication simply cannot entirely replace face-to-face meetings.
Developing agendas that are relevant to all members around the world can also be challenging. We don’t have all the solutions to these challenges yet, but the committees, our governing bodies and we in the UFI offices are all thinking about them. Please let us know if you have any ideas.
Most critically, what came through from the meetings was the importance of a genuine exchange of information to make an association like UFI work. One of our committee chairs used the phrase “discover and share” when describing their work and I think it sums up perfectly how we should all approach our membership in the association. There is much to be learned from listening to other members and the flow of information needs to go in every direction.
This was first published in issue 4/2013 of EW. Any comments? Email exhibitionnews@mashmedia.net
