JUNE 2009 MEMBER MESSAGE

Hello A-O Division Members! Summer is upon us, and it seems as if the summer heat has hit us full blast! I hope you are enjoying the “lazy days of summer” as we wrap up our “Excellence in Action” year!

2009 A-O Division Annual Meeting

I hope those of you who attended the 2009 A-O Division Annual Meeting at the Cherokee Casino Resort had a great time! For those of you who were unable to attend, well, you missed a GREAT meeting! We had 78 IAAP members and guests in attendance. Members who attended the entire weekend, including the two seminars provided by the host Chapter on Friday, were able to walk away with eight (8) recertification points! For a complete summary of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Arkansas-Oklahoma Division Meeting, which includes those Chapters and Members we recognized at our Annual Awards Banquet Dinner, please go to our website (www.iaap-ao.org). You will find the summary under the A-O Members Place tab, then under A-O News.

Our Southwest District Director, Toni Smith CPS/CAP, attended Annual Meeting and provided an International update. She also left with a good impression of the A-O Division. The following are comments she shared with us regarding her attendance at the A-O Division Meeting:

Ø       She said her visit to the A-O Division Annual Meeting was wonderful, the Division’s hospitality was great, and we made her feel right at home.

Ø       She thought it was a good idea to allow members to speak during the business session and not limit it to Delegates only.

Ø       She thought it was a great way to communicate to members the results of the Membership Satisfaction Survey sent to members in March 2009. (You can find the survey results and the comments of our members on our website at www.iaap-ao.org in the A-O News section, along with the Division’s report as presented to members who attended Annual Meeting.)

Ø       She thought it was a nice, personal touch to have the Division Officers present recognition awards to the Chapters for whom they were the Division Board Contact.

Ø       We learned from Toni that the A-O Division website was the prototype used by the District Directors earlier in the year when they created guidelines for review of Chapter and Division websites across the association. (We always knew we had an AWESOME website!)

Also posted in the A-O News Section of the A-O Division website (www.iaap-ao.org) are President Bryan’s outgoing comments and her incoming comments.

Thank you again to the Tulsa Chapter members for hosting such a great A-O Division Annual Meeting! Your A-O Division Officers appreciate all your hard work and dedication in making this year’s Annual Meeting one we will remember for many years!

International EFAM

We hope many of you are planning to attend the upcoming International EFAM Meeting in Minneapolis, MN from July 26-29. Your 2009-2010 Division Officers will be communicating to you in the near future our plans for an A-O Division dinner while we are in Minneapolis. The A-O Division has also purchased three (3) tables (24 seats) through the Banquet Table Reservation Fundraiser, which will benefit Second Harvest (who provides food to local food shelves throughout the upper Midwest). The A-O Division will make these seats reserved seats available to our members who will be attending the EFAM. We will provide more information regarding this in the very near future.

2009 Educational Leadership Conference

Each year the A-O Division provides an Educational Leadership Conference to its members. The date for this year’s event is Saturday, August 22, at the Hampton Inn in Van Buren, AR. Why Van Buren? Well, if you draw lines on a map from Little Rock over to Oklahoma City, up to Stillwater up to Bartlesville down to Tulsa over to Bentonville down to Fayetteville and back over to Little Rock, you’ll find that Van Buren is almost smack-dab in the middle of all of us. We want to make it an equal drive for everybody.

We have reserved a block of rooms for IAAP members for Friday evening, August 21, 2009 at a rate of $94 per room. You will need to call the hotel directly to reserve your room with a credit card guarantee. The number for the hotel is 479/471-7447. (There is no toll-free number available for reserving a room.) We have reserved a block of 10 singles and 10 doubles for reservation by our members. Once again, there will not be a registration charge for A-O Division Members to attend. However, we will bill those members who register but do not attend for their food cost afterwards. The A-O Division will provide reimbursement again to members for half their hotel room cost for Friday night, up to $47 plus tax.

Your 2009-2010 Division Officers are already hard at work planning this event for you. We do know we will offer educational seminars that will provide recertification points and will share information with you from EFAM. More information will be available to you as we continue to finalize our plans. However, we want everyone to plan to attend. There will be something for everybody.

Pathways to Excellence

It isn’t too late to submit your criteria to become a Member of Excellence or a Chapter of Excellence. Members have until June 30 to submit their criteria to Headquarters, and Chapters have until July 10 to submit their criteria to Headquarters. You will find links to the online submission forms at http://pathways.iaap-hq.org.

As of June 2, 2009, the A-O Division had 17 members who had already submitted their criteria to become Members of Excellence! Congratulations to these members:

Linda Williams CPS/C AP – Division Member at Large

Teresa Tidwell CAP – Central Arkansas Chapter

Linda Dizney CAP – Razorback Chapter

Sandy Hancock CPS – Razorback Chapter

Dana Ledbetter – Razorback Chapter

Tamara Ellenbecker – Razorback Chapter

Jamie Watson CAP – Bartlesville Chapter

Jodi McMillin CPS/CAP – Bartlesville Chapter

Brenda McKinnis – Bartlesville Chapter

Brenda Matlock CAP – Bartlesville Chapter

Lacey Courtney CAP – American Fidelity Chapter

Kelly Ashworth CAP – American Fidelity Chapter

Florence Fly CPS/CAP – American Fidelity Chapter

Cheryl Cook CPS/CAP – Oklahoma City Chapter

Janet Griebel CPS CTM – Land Run Professionals Chapter

Christine Hilderbrand CPS/CAP – Tulsa Chapter

Jamie Ward CPS/CAP – Tulsa Chapter

Congratulations also to the American Fidelity Chapter for submitting its criteria to become a Chapter of Excellence!

2009-2010 A-O Division Officers

Your 2009-2010 A-O Division Officers are as follows:

·         President Marsha Bryan CPS/CAP – American Fidelity Chapter

·         President Elect Cheryl Cook CPS/CAP – Oklahoma City Chapter

·         Vice President Sandy Tabio – Tulsa Chapter

·         Secretary Teresa Tidwell CAP – Central Arkansas Chapter

·         Treasurer Donna Nerio – Will Rogers Chapter

We will announce the 2009-2010 A-O Division Committee Chairs and members in the July Member Message.

The 2009-2010 A-O Division Officers conducted their first Board Meeting immediately after the A-O Division Annual Meeting and assigned the following Board contacts for the Chapters and Committees:

·         President Marsha Bryan CPS/CAP – Board contact for Land Run Professionals Chapter and Tulsa Chapter

·         President Elect Cheryl Cook CPS/CAP – Board contact for DMALs, Central Arkansas Chapter and Certification Committee

·         Vice President Sandy Tabio – Board contact for American Fidelity Chapter, Will Rogers Chapter, and APW/Education/Programs Committee

·         Secretary Teresa Tidwell CAP – Board contact for Benton County Chapter, Razorback Chapter, and Bylaws Committee

·         Treasurer Donna Nerio – Board contact for Bartlesville Chapter, Oklahoma City Chapter, and Nominations Committee

Calling All Creative Members

The A-O Division Officers are looking for a creative member of our Division to create a graphic design of a Header for the Division’s new website. The specifications for the Header are as follows: Must be a .gif, .jpg, or .png image that is 954 pixels wide and 180 pixels high in order to fit correctly. If it is larger, it will be re-sized to fit within these dimensions. Please note that the IAAP logo and name in the top left corner is permanent and not a part of the header that we can change to be our own. The header does not need to contain the IAAP logo or name. The graphic design must be representative of our two states and must include the words Arkansas-Oklahoma Division, Inc. We encourage members to look at other chapter/division headers in the Web Community for examples. A good place to start would be the Missouri Division’s website. Please submit your design by July 24. We will then have the members vote to determine the winning entry from July 25-31. Our website will display the winning design on August 1. We will award a prize to the member who submits the winning header. We will announce what the prize will be on the Division’s website on Monday, June 29.

Website Community

Below are the Chapters that have websites published in the Website Community:

·         American Fidelity Chapter (www.iaap-americanfidelity.org)

·         Oklahoma City Chapter (www.iaap-oklahomacity.org)

·         Razorback Chapter (www.iaap-razorback.org)

·         Tulsa Chapter (www.iaap-tulsa.org)

·         Will Rogers Chapter (www.iaap-willrogers.org)

·         The Bartlesville Chapter is working to get their website published soon (www.iaap-bartlesville.org).

If you have not yet visited the new Website Community, we encourage you to go out and look. There are many new features on the new website community for our members. You can follow conversations on the E-Forums, you can post and read other members’ blogs, you can post or look for documents in the Document Libraries, and you can set up your own profile. In fact, a member posted to the General IAAP Discussion E-Forum last month a great suggestion for members who may or may not have company support for their membership. When putting together your profile on the website community, a great idea would be for you to include the name of your company, what they do and add their website to your profile. This is a way we can all portray our employers in a positive light. If we mention our place of employment on our profile, we need to remember that we are representing our place of employment and we are the “face” of our company within IAAP. Because our members are the ones with connections to our employers’ executives, why wouldn’t we want to take advantage of the marketing and branding we can provide to our employers? If we make business connections on behalf of our executives, wouldn’t that make our positions within our companies that much more indispensable. Just a little food for thought!

In Closing

Your 2008-2009 A-O Division Officers would like to take this time to express their appreciation and gratitude to you, the great members of the A-O Division! Thank you for allowing us to serve you and thank you for your participation in our “Excellence in Action” year!

We hope this Member Message has been informative and useful to you. Don’t forget, your questions, complaints, suggestions, comments and/or compliments are always welcome! We welcome feedback of any kind and we love hearing from our Members, so please, let us hear from you!

President Marsha Bryan CPS/CAP, American Fidelity Chapter (marsha.bryan@af-group.com)

Vice President Janet Griebel CPS CTM, Land Run Professionals Chapter (janetg@ctechok.org)

Secretary Florence Fly CPS/CAP, American Fidelity Chapter (florence.fly@af-group.com)

Treasurer Sandy Tabio, Tulsa Chapter (sandytabio@aol.com)