As I write this column, the ASM Renewal is passing the 30-month mark in a 36-month turnaround program. Membership and revenues are growing. ASM is debtfree and generating positive cash flows. We have crossed the Digital Divide and have now established a reliable e-commerce backbone and digital-first content delivery model. Further, we have improved support for our Foundation.
During these transformations, I have asked for patience and persistence from our board, affiliates, chapters, and volunteers. The improvements we have achieved have come in concentric rings, starting within the Dome, moving to the affiliates, and now out to additional satellites.
With respect to chapters, in 2018 we licensed STEM Premier, a private social network that chapters can use to identify local high school and college students for connecting and recruitment. Through that tool, we created high school memberships in ASM, with badging for students for ASM-related activities. In April, we also released the first Digital Short Courses, which can be customized and re-sold by chapters for use at monthly technical meetings. We are now licensing and deploying a market-leading collaboration tool, which will be announced at this year’s Leadership Days. It will be available before the end of the year for a wide variety of chapter processes and support.
For volunteers, the new collaboration tool goes handin-hand with a new committee restructuring initiative, which will be launched in Q3 of this year with a pilot phase and then a full roll-out in 2020, leading up to the IMAT 2020 conference. The essentials of committee restructuring are intended to increase volunteer engagement by providing an operational template, which will allow self-organized interest groups to spontaneously form (primarily technical) committees. The collaboration tool will permit these self-actuated committees to deliver their outputs not only to ASM headquarters, but also to other committees with related interests.
The Operations Team looks forward to working with our chapters and volunteers as we round into the home stretch of completing the ASM Renewal and entering the ASM Realization phase in 2020 and beyond.
William T. Mahoney, CEO, ASM International
[email protected]
This excerpt is from the July / August issue of Advanced Materials & Processes (AM&P).
