The Society has achieved a lot over the last few years including delivering major meetings, increasing grants to support physiology, launching a new journal and moving into Hodgkin Huxley House. As part of its forward plan, the Council is emphasising a re-focus on our membership and over the next twelve months you should see some significant changes. The re-focusing on membership covers two key areas:
- supporting physiology at local level; and
- transforming membership administration.
Over the last 10 to 20 years, the number of physiology departments in the UK has declined significantly as consolidation of university biology and biomedical departments has crept across the UK. This has been illustrated by data collected in our on-going Health of Physiology project. Also, it is clear that within institutions our membership is widely distributed. So we want to support the creation of ‘virtual’ physiology departments across institutions.
The ‘Society Reps’ are a key part of our work and play a vital role at local level. We want to support them and devolve funding to provide flexibility to support physiology in their institution, all within a clearer role description. Over the next eight months we will be seeking the views of Society Reps and aim to re-launch the Society Reps scheme in the first part of 2015. This re-launch will include:
- clear terms of reference for Society Reps and terms of office, which are renewable for a short period;
- devolved funds to support membership recruitment and support physiology locally.
The devolved funds cannot be string-free – there will need to be guidelines and some accountability on how this can be used, but the overall principal is to support flexibility.
Over the last few months we have compared our membership administration with other societies and Council has approved two developments:
- investment in a new Membership Management System (MMS); and
- a re-structuring to focus more on supporting our membership.
Our current MMS dates from the 1990s – in terms of technologies this equates to the old mobile phone ‘bricks’ compared to modern smartphones. A new system will allow us to analyse and track Members more effectively and help us to ensure our records are up to date, while retaining the history.
The second aspect is an internal re-organisation to create a Membership & Marketing Manager plus restructuring support for administration. The staff changes overall will be cost neutral financially within the year and save money year-on-year, but most importantly will improve our administration coupled with the introduction of a new MMS.
The staff changes mean we have to say farewell to two staff members: Sarah Miller and Jacob Lonsdale. Sarah has been a long-standing member of staff at The Society and through manning the membership phone and email has become known to many of you. I am sure you will join me in thanking Sarah for contribution and hard work in supporting our membership.
The post of Head of Media and Communications will cease to exist in the reorganisation and so we need to say farewell also to Jacob. In his two years with us Jacob has delivered a number of key projects for The Society, that include transforming our video and podcasting of lectures and meetings and sustaining and developing our website.
In the new structure the Media and Communications Officer will report to the new role of Membership and Marketing Manager, Helen Burgess, who will report to Nick Boross-Toby as Director of Marketing, which encompasses events, membership and communications. This makes sense, not least because Nick has led and developed a great events team, but because our meetings are one of the key interactions we have with our Members and communication is an essential element of both these functions.
While change is always difficult we firmly believe that these changes will improve our support for Members and the discipline of physiology itself.
Our objectives for 2014 and moving forward are:
- To transform our support, engagement and communication with Members, providing enhanced and more effective she Society, providing timely and proactive support and assistance
We encourage Members to provide any feedback on our current state of affairs to assist us during this period of transition. Please contact membership@physoc.org.