IChemE Members Groups are organised by volunteers. People give up their spare time to try and organise events for other members. Regular committee meetings are held to help co-ordinate what everyone is working on.
The Scottish Members Group covers a large geographic area, not quite all Scotland but not far off. This makes coordinating meetings difficult. In practice in the past this is meant focusing on the Central belt between Edinburgh and Glasgow. But even in this smaller region we have still struggled to get people to regularly travel from Edinburgh to Glasgow and vice versa.
We could of course just try and hold the meetings halfway between the two cities but when we did that nobody travelled.
In the past we have had some success in getting people to to join us remotely via Skype. I thought we could try and take this a step further and host the whole meeting over Skype. This is proved to be no more popular than any of the other attempts.
Next month I think we will try and host to physical meetings connected by Skype and see if that improves attendance. Failing that I could always try moving the meeting to a pub.
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said on: 09 Jan 2020 at 09:11
If you've tried all the location options then that can't be the issue. People can normally overcome time & location challenges if they're motivated to. It's the motivation that matters - so making sure each meeting has a clear purpose and achieves something really matters. Maybe a refresh and reset of the meeting terms of reference?
said on: 09 Jan 2020 at 09:52
I have been playing with the format - though of course only those that have made it to the meetings will have seen them. The meetings are certainly much shorter than they used to be and contain less of the "administration" side of things.
I could probably do a better job of advertising/reminding folk about the meetings. Perhaps my last throw away comment about doing it in a pub should be taken a bit more seriously. Turning the events into a more social occasion than an administration one.
said on: 09 Jan 2020 at 10:26
Sounds good. It's a tough job though, well done forn taking it on.