A Message from President Osborn

April-May 2009

What is the value of the Annual Conference and Meeting?

One of the more pleasant responsibilities of the ACHE president is to visit each of the organization’s regional conferences.  During the business meeting at one of these conferences, the vice chair of the region asked the attendees whether they should consider cancelling their 2010 regional meeting.  After all, the economy was weak, budgets were tight, and travel was difficult.  After a brief silence, one fellow spoke up.  “You know,” he said, “if we cancel our meeting ourselves, then what we’re saying to the decision makers is that it wasn’t very important to begin with.”

I’ve cleaned up his language a bit – if I remember correctly, he had a more colorful term for the decision makers – and I know the decision is not quite that simple.  But his comments stick in my mind and have shaped my thinking.  This issue hits home because our state continuing education organization decided to cancel its fall conference for the first time in its history.  While I didn’t disagree with that decision at the time, I now think it was a mistake.  Our continuing education meetings are not trivial.  All of this is a somewhat convoluted introduction to this month’s topic—the benefits of attending the ACHE Annual Conference and Meeting.

The Annual Conference and Meeting is important to the organization. The first task listed under the responsibilities of the ACHE President is to “ensure an Annual Conference and Meeting of the highest quality.”  The Annual Conference and Meeting is ACHE’s signature activity and its success is the President’s responsibility. (I’m glad there’s no pressure.) A successful conference blends CONTENT, LOCATION, and COST.  It requires a lineup of knowledgeable speakers and concurrent sessions, an attractive location, and a reasonable price that can garner institutional support.  This is all intuitive to meeting planners as well as what our members report.  As far as why ACHE members attend the Annual Conference and Meeting, overwhelmingly, they identify the opportunity to network as the primary benefit of attendance.  But what does networking mean, and what other benefits can we identify from conference attendance?  Here is my reasoning, which can be useful for folks who have to fight to attend the Annual Conference and Meeting.
           
It seems to me that a successful conference must have benefits for (1) the organization sending the attendee and (2) the professional continuing educator attending the conference.  I am calling these Organizational Benefits and Professional Benefits, realizing, of course, that there is some overlap.

• ORGANIZATIONAL BENEFITS.  There are benefits that accrue primarily to the college or university.  Organizations cannot succeed by isolating themselves, living in a vacuum, unaware of what the competition is doing.  An ACHE-member organization wants its continuing educators to know current trends, new programming initiatives, best-practices in the field, model programs, and programs that make money as well as those that are unsuccessful.  They want to know how their continuing education operation compares to others, both domestic and international.  This learning takes place in formal settings—the concurrent sessions where peers share knowledge—and informally during breaks, receptions, and meals.  The Annual Conference and Meeting is the perfect opportunity for this benchmarking to take place.  Each year, while concurrent session topics change, conference attendees are always exposed to award-winning programs and successful marketing campaigns.  The conference is a sea of ideas, an ocean of opportunities.  It’s not uncommon to hear an ACHE member say they always take one or two good ideas from the conference back to their institution for implementation.  This is networking, but it is also more.  It is also what I like to call netlearning.  And it’s certainly worth the cost and effort of attendance.  Additionally, there is no better opportunity for a new continuing educator to learn about the field than in the conference setting.  At a recent ACHE Great Plains regional, I witnessed a veteran continuing educator spend over an hour mentoring someone from another university who had just been appointed to a continuing education position.  It was a conversation that developed from the simple question: “How do you do this at your institution?”  In all my years in the field, I’ve never seen a continuing educator hesitate to answer that question. 

• PROFESSIONAL BENEFITS.  These are benefits that accrue primarily to the individual continuing educator, but they are no less valuable organizational benefits.  The Annual Conference and Meeting is the best opportunity to learn the culture of the field, to learn how to be a continuing educator.  Professional conduct and collegiality are modeled.  There are formal and informal opportunities for mentoring.  Attendees learn about job openings, the status of searches, and if a search has a favored internal candidate.  Attendees form contacts that can help them find future jobs.  For example, I’ve written several letters of reference for colleagues I first met at an ACHE conference and have gotten to know throughout the years as we worked together on planning committees or other work of the association.  I’ve called ACHE colleagues for recommendations when I’ve conducted my own searches.