4.4 Houston Chapter

Houston Chapter (1998)

Introduction

The Houston Chapter of the IEEE Communications Society has been active since the 1970s. Meetings are held monthly September to April. At the end of the 1990 program year, the Chapter was faced with decreasing attendance and increasing meeting costs. Almost a year later, in April 1991, attendance at each meeting had more than doubled and meeting costs were kept at reasonable levels. This case study describes some of the challenges we faced and what we learned from dealing with these challenges.

Challenges

As in most volunteer organizations, it is difficult for the officers to meet outside of the regularly scheduled Chapter meetings. Our only such meeting occurred in August when the new officers met over lunch to discuss the strategy for the program year. Although all the officers already knew each other from previous IEEE activities, this session became a very good icebreaker.

At this first meeting we set some important objectives:

• Increase the attendance at the monthly meetings
• Find a location that would be convenient to our members
• Assign individual tasks to each officer

At the same time, we reviewed our Chapter organization to ensure each meeting went well.

Chapter Membership

The Chapter membership consists of IEEE members who have formally joined the Communications Society, of regular IEEE members, and of non-IEEE communications professionals who regularly attend the monthly meetings.

The meetings are open to the public. These are held during lunch on the third Tuesday of each month in the Medical Center area, south of Downtown Houston. Thus, the dates are known in advance for the year. During this program year, the topics are announced one meeting ahead of time and a mail-out with detailed information goes out about three weeks ahead of time.

Reservations are suggested but not required of the members who wish to attend. It helps to know approximately how many people are coming when making arrangements with the restaurant.

Chapter Officers

The Chapter has a typical officer structure composed of Chair, Vice Chair, Secretary and Treasurer. For several years, Southwestern Bell employees held three out of four, if not all, of the positions. This changed to where the Chair and Treasurer positions were held by two employees of Shell Oil, while Southwestern Bell employees held the other two positions.

The current officers' structure recognizes the profound changes in the industry since the AT&T divestiture. Communications is no longer limited to local operating companies or to carriers. Instead, communications is essential to everyone's business and each company has its own Communications Department.

The Chair provides the continuity for the Chapter. As such, first time officers are not offered this position. The Chair may also attend Houston Section meetings and represented the Chapter at these meetings. The other responsibilities are to set the direction of the program year, coordinate the tasks of the other officers, and MC the monthly meetings. At the end of the program year, the Chairman has the final task to recommend new officers.

Within the Houston Chapter, the responsibility to find speakers for the meetings is given to the Vice Chair. The understanding is that the Chair will always be available to help in case a speaker is not available. However, it is the Vice Chair that contacts the speaker and acts as the interface to the Chapter.

The Secretary has the responsibility to interface with the Houston Section newsletter. This was our means of announcing upcoming meetings to all Houston IEEE members. At the same time, the Secretary maintains our own mailing list of people who regularly attend our meetings. We have an address database that is used to generate mailing labels and Southwestern Bell contributes the copies, envelopes and postage. We also generated a sign-up list for each meeting so we could track the number of attendees, the companies they work for, and whether they are members of IEEE (or interested in receiving an application). This sign-up list became the basis for our monthly report to the IEEE.

The Treasurer has the responsibility to negotiate prices with various restaurants and hotels for a meeting site for the year. He also sets the meeting prices that our members pay. This is a delicate task because the Chapter is not expected to retain a profit; on the other hand, we must collect enough to pay the establishment (with tax and gratuity) after each meeting and to cover the speaker's meal.

Problem Identification

As part of the effort to increase meeting attendance and member interest, we looked at the factors that we have to deal with. We also informally polled some members for feedback. We asked ourselves "What really attracts someone to our meetings?" The answers we came up with were both simple and surprising. In engineering terms, it goes back to simple price/performance. The member wants to know what he/she receives from the meeting in return for the time and money.

The relevant factors are presented in three broad categories.

Profile of member

• most are full-time professional
• some University of Houston and Texas A&M students
• all are involved in communications
• more project level and management level people than strictly technical
• an even mixture of people from RBOC/carriers and the end-user side
• most work in or around the Downtown Houston area

Factors within our control

• Meeting time
• Meeting location
• Speaker selection
• Meeting cost
• Meeting notification
• Meeting structure

Areas of improvement

• Meeting topics
• Meeting notification
• Meeting structure
• Coordination among officers

With only four people doing the work with only one month between August and the first meeting in September, these factors presented a challenge in themselves. It is at these times that the strength of the officer teams really comes through.

Problem Resolution

The member profile helped immensely by telling us about the target audience and what factors really mattered to the audience.

We decided to maintain the lunch hour meeting format. In reality, the "hour" consisted of social lasting 30 minutes, a lunch lasting 30 minutes, and a speech topic lasting up to 45 minutes. Thus, a member had to allocate two hours out of his/her busy schedule plus commute time, and in a city like Houston, a lunch hour round trip commuting time could take as long as one hour.

We also decided that people would attend our meeting only if they could justify the time or if they could make the commute with a minimum of hassle. This pointed the officers to two areas: location and topic selection.

Although Downtown Houston would have been ideal, its cost and problems with parking deterred us. Instead our treasurer settled for the Medical Center just a few miles from downtown with several fine hotels and restaurants. We decided that menu selection and quality were important as well, but we discovered that a varied menu would increase serving time and cost.

We settled with a locally well-known restaurant which offered a truly remarkable lunch buffet (that we thought we could not afford) which included shrimp, dessert tray, and iced tea. We negotiated a spacious and quiet private room for just over $11 a person including tax and gratuity, and set a meeting cost of $12.50 for the program year. The extra would cover the speaker's lunch with as few as ten people attending. We were yet to be surprised.

For topic selection, we looked at the general scope and breadth of the topics from previous years. We soon realized that these had been too technical and too directed toward carrier topics. Our regular members were no longer interested in the framing structure of a multiplexed bit stream, or in the detailed protocol between switching centers. These people wanted to learn about the big picture at the system level and understand the impact of a technology on their business. The theme for the program year would be Applications!

I took the responsibility to call the officers during the monthly cycle between meetings to follow up on speaker selection, restaurant arrangements, newsletter deadlines, etc. We committed to having a confirmed speaker about six weeks ahead of time so we could make mailing and editorial deadlines, and so I could announce the next speaker at each meeting.

We committed to finding speakers from new sources who had interesting applications to share with the members. Our Program Chair's previous position as the Program Chair for the Houston Section helped in establishing that first contact with the speakers.

The Program Chair passed the program information to the newsletter editor and prepared the first mailing. We also personally called many of the members to remind them of the first meeting after the summer break.

Results

At the first meeting in September 1990, we announced the program theme of Applications. Our first speaker was a program manager from Southwestern Bell on the topic of "Communications for the 1990 Economic Summit." This was a very timely topic, as the Summit was held in July 1990 and still fresh in the people's minds. About 35 people attended the meeting! The speaker had everyone's attention as he described how the latest and greatest (and sometimes unorthodox) in communications provided the bells and whistles of the system put in place for a short week in July.

The 35 people at the first meeting was a record for the Houston Chapter in recent memory and surprised all of us. It was very rewarding for the officers to know that the arrangements and the topics were well received.

With 35 people in attendance, another meeting benefit became obvious: socializing and information sharing. Professionals from competing companies were elbow-to-elbow discussing the latest trends in communications and comparing notes. Everyone was really enjoying themselves.

The topics that followed during the program year included:

Med-Net, Houston Medical Center Medical Network
Communications for Smart Highways
Applications of 560 Mb/s Redundant Rings in MANs
Space Communications at NASA Johnson Space Center
Tutorial on VSAT Technology
RF to Fiber Optics Conversion at HL&P

These talks were given by communications professionals from Baylor College of Medicine, the Texas Highway Department, Shell Oil, Houston Lighting and Power, and NASA. None of these are the "traditional" communications shops but all of them were at the cutting edge of an area within communications and had something interesting to share with the rest of us.

Throughout the program year, the attendance averaged 35 people at each meeting with a high of 40 at one meeting. Now we had the problem of collecting too much cash at the meetings even after paying for the speaker's meal. The treasurer, Patrick, offered a novel suggestion that was an immediate hit with the members: we collected business cards from all present (except for the officers) and randomly drew one card for a $12.50 refund - a free lunch! We have been able to do this and pay the restaurant bill at every meeting. We will use the remaining cash from this program year to pay for the August 1991 officers lunch meeting.

The attitude was a positive one and there some anecdotal facts we would like to share. We had a professional recruiting company (head-hunters) sign up for a meeting so they could mingle with prospects and hand out business cards. We had people call our published number in the Pocket Scope to find out what the next topic would be, where and when. We had people offer ideas for topics and even volunteer to give a speech. We even had a Section Committee member come to circulate a petition to change one of the IEEE Bylaws. We do not know if the head-hunters hired anyone or if the amendment ever passed.

In retrospect, we stood by our task commitments and had an extremely successful program year. Our attendance averaged 35 people for each meeting and we had a high of 40 at one meeting. We proved to ourselves that if we make it worthwhile to the members, they would take the time to attend.

Planning for the Future

We will continue to do the things that worked for us this year and continually look to improve. We plan to continue meeting during lunch at the same restaurant and we will choose topics of general interest within communications. We are thinking about extending our program year to include May.

Currently, we are talking with professionals from companies other than Shell Oil and Southwestern Bell to find nominations for officers. The intent is to spread the industry involvement even more to appeal to an even larger membership base.