Filed under: Intranets, Step Two Forum
We’re conducting our yearly review of the Intranet Leadership Forum at present. A big part is to look back at lessons learnt over the last year.
When we first set up the forum, there was only individual membership, at $3,750/year (inc GST). Last year, we introduced corporate membership, allowing three participants to attend from the one organisation. At $5,750/year, this proved to be even more popular than individual membership.
What has been interesting for us is how these corporate memberships have generated unexpected value for member organisations:
- Where the intranet is split across multiple business areas (eg comms, IT), participants can come from each area. The facilitated workshops provide an extremely productive environment for building shared awareness, and planning concrete actions. It seems that being out of the office and the structure of the workshops are big factors in making this work well.
- Some teams have started inviting a business content owner to the sessions, to help them build their understanding of intranet issues. By bringing a different author/owner each time, the whole author community is empowered.
- Some members come from complex organisations, such as universities, closely-related groups of government agencies or large corporates (banks, etc). The corporate membership allows participation from multiple levels of the organisation, helping to coordinate the many intranet activities going on.
- Australia-wide organisations are using corporate membership to send participants to chapters in different cities. This allows remote teams to benefit fully from the knowledge, as well as helping to build up an even bigger professional network.
At the request of current members, we’ll be offering new options for larger corporate memberships, allowing 5 or 8 participants. Watch this space.
We’ll also likely be increasing costs in the near future, so this is a good time to sign up at the current rate. Contact Catherine Grenfell for more information. (At present, we have forums in Sydney, Canberra, Brisbane, Melbourne and Wellington.)