Rules of attraction
Rob Seitz”™s interest was piqued when he saw an ad for a social media seminar ”“ that is, until he scrolled to the bottom of the page and saw the $900 price tag affixed to the day-long soirée.
“I thought it sounded interesting”¦but not that interesting!” said the Mamaroneck, N.Y.-based communications professional and vice president of the Fairfield County Public Relations Association. “For an individual like myself, I don”™t have anybody to charge an expense like that back to.”
The independent communications consultant, like many of his professional peers, calls his office “home” and inevitably needed the interaction and time away from the monitor that professional networking groups afford.
A key issue for him, as vice president of FCPRA, is to offer cost-conscious programming.
“We”™re not a rich organization, but we give all of these sweetheart deals, where for instance, if you come to a meeting as a nonmember and you join, you can come to the next meeting for free or whatnot,” Seitz said.
Kim DePra, president of the Fairfield County Public Relations Association, said the organization began a rewards card program, which gives a little something back to the frequent attendee.
“We truly understand that people”™s time is extremely valuable and it”™s hard enough to get out of the office,” said the director of marketing for The Ashforth Co. in Stamford. “So in order to get them out of the office, you have to provide great programming. Everyone says, ”˜What”™s in it for me? I need to have something to take away.”™”
Echoing her thoughts is Wendy Van Parys, the New Canaan, Conn.-based principal of Wendy Van Parys Marketing Communications and president of the Public Relations Society of America Westchester/Fairfield chapter.
“I think one of the things we”™ve seen is that historically, corporations and agencies paid the fees for employees to go to big conferences and the dues to join professional organizations, but that”™s something that”™s not happening so much anymore,” Van Parys said. “Locally, we”™ve seen a shift from more corporate and agency folks to people exploring the viable opportunity of branching out on their own and maybe do it while job-hunting.”
Van Parys said that PRSA events are traditionally content-based and that sectional groups ranging from “technology” to “young professionals” further break down members into niche networking groups.
Both the PRSA Westchester/Fairfield and FCPRA have roughly less than 120 members respectively. PRSA nationally has about 21,000 members.
The FCPRA began as a five-member group in 1959.
Van Parys said, “One thing that has made us extremely successful in attracting new members is hosting peer groups monthly for sole practitioners and one for corporate people and one for nonprofit people.”
Seitz said the FCPRA has, in order to encourage new membership and to keep members attending monthly meetings, stepped up its programming efforts to cover topics like lead generation and how to pitch “green” and “sustainable” subjects, which Seitz said was originally met with a “collective yawn” at a board meeting.
Brainstorming led to new ways of looking at what could be deemed commonplace in 2010.
“The spin we put on it was, ”˜How do you sustain sustainability?”™ especially if a company has invested a lot of money into it and now all of a sudden, the whole idea is 2008,” Seitz said.