Our Future is Bright
This is my final President’s message and I want to take a moment to assess our progress. This has been a good year and we are very encouraged for the future.
Financially strong
Our financial strength and reporting are excellent, and we have made good investments to improve the experience for our members.
Membership growth
A key priority for us has been membership growth and we have been successful in driving this to now be 190 members. Two big factors for this are excellent programming and a vastly improved website. We still have more to do, but over the past couple of years we added great content and more accessibility for members and guests. It is a big driver for how new members are finding us.
Our Facebook and Instagram presence was relaunched earlier this year and is continuing to attract interest and traffic with visitors. We are putting a further focus there to contact more people who share our passion for woodworking. Social media is an important channel to reach those who are in the beginning stages of developing a woodworking hobby.
Meeting engagement
Twenty months ago, we lost the ability to meet in person. We pivoted from that setback to successfully host our meetings on Zoom. Over 100 participants came to our November meeting which was a direct result of great programming, a streaming capability, and social media to bring people to the event.
We look forward to returning to in-person meetings in 2022 (timing to be determined) and will simultaneously stream our meetings live so members can have the option to attend in person or on-line. This will expand our opportunities to reach even more new members.
Board realignment
An important shift for us is repositioning our Board to be a smaller group focused on governance. We are moving more of our operational activities to committees and task groups so more of the membership gets engaged in running our Guild. That is where we need your eager involvement and I hope you will volunteer and respond to requests to participate in that way.
Our future is bright! I hope to see you at a meeting soon.
