From the Association: Strategic Planning 2011

From the HighEdWeb Board of Directors:

We’re planning for the future, and we need your help.  Over the last few months, the Higher Education Web Professionals Association’s  Board of Directors, along with some peers and colleagues, have begun a dialogue regarding the Association, the strategic context within which it operates, and plans for the future. To date, the Association is most closely associated with our annual conference HighEdWeb, and that is certainly an event of which we are proud and that we hope to continue into the future. However, new initiatives are also emerging: HighEdWeb regional conferences, the LINK journal, and more. This discussion, then, is about how the Association can continue to evolve to support and best meet the needs of its members and its mission, and we want to give you a chance to share your thoughts.

In a series of posts to be made over the coming weeks to this blog, we’ll be asking for your feedback on and contributions to our strategic planning. We’re using a SWOT analysis to organize our discussions.

As with any planning activity, it’s important to focus on our purpose. The Association’s mission, as conference attendees helped define it in 2005, is to advance Web professionals, technologies, and standards in higher education.

To begin this work, today’s post is about our strengths. For this activity, strengths are defined as internal attributes of theAassociation that will be helpful in achieving our objectives. In our initial work on this project, we identified the following as our primary strengths:

• The engagement of the HighEdWeb community at conferences and online, its enthusiasm for our collective work, and the Association’s tradition of listening to feedback in making changes to our events.
• Our annual conference (this year in Austin), certainly our most visible activity to date, with its associated quality, reputation, growth, and momentum.
• The dedication of our volunteers to make HighEdWeb activities happen, and their connections to the Web profession in higher education.
• Credibility from our peers that comes from being an organization comprised of higher education Web professionals working for higher education Web professionals.
• The financial stability of a reserve fund, built up over past annual conferences, to ensure our continuation and to support new initiatives.

That’s the view of our strengths from the inside, so to speak. What’s your view? Have we missed any strengths of this group? Are there additional aspects of these strengths that we left off? Please contribute to the discussion in the comments.