STC chapter question -- what should an employer expect?

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

T.W. Smith wondered: <<Let's say your an employer. And you gots a pubs 
dept.  with 5 writers and a pubs manager. What would you, as the 
employer (meaning the boss of the pubs manager) want to get in return 
for signing your crew up for the STC?>>

Depends. In most jurisdictions, you get a significant tax deduction for 
that expense, and in others (such as Quebec, where I live), the 
membership cost counts towards the provincially mandated expenditures 
on training. That alone may justify signing up all six of you for 
membership. If budgets are tight, you wouldn't be the first company to 
buy 1 membership and share the publications with everyone else in the 
group.

I can't speak for STC as a whole, but I can tell you what STC Montreal 
provided for this money while I was president. Here's a short list off 
the top of my head:
- 8-10 monthly meetings per year, with speakers giving 1-1.5 hour 
presentations at most meetings
- 2-3 networking dinners per year (no speaker, but we do have an annual 
storytelling pub night with 1-2 professional storytellers)
- a quarterly newsletter
- occasional joint meetings with other local professional societies
- a job bank (free to employers), with opportunities distributed to 
members at least 1 week before nonmembers get to see it
- meeting attendance free to members versus $10 (formerly $5) to 
nonmembers; a $10 discount for dinner meetings, which are otherwise 
priced at cost
- 1-2 full-day training seminars per year, with a discount of ca. $50 
for members.
- a lively social circle
- (just recently) a 50% discount on stationery supplies from a local 
office-supply store

Of course, I have been accused of being somewhat obsessive about 
organizing chapter activities. <g> Depending on how you want to account 
for these funds, you may find that a membership pays for itself. See, 
for example:
Hart, G.J. 2005. The economics of STC membership: for everything else, 
there's Mastercard. Tieline, February 2005. 
http://www.stc.org/tieline/tie0502/woestendiek.htm#hart

Note that STC devotes most of its money to things of national interest 
other than chapters (a journal, a magazine, special interest groups, a 
Web site, conference calls, regional conferences, and the annual 
conference), so not all that much (proportionally) filters back to 
chapters. As a result, not all chapters have a sufficiently significant 
budget to do much of anything. And since none of us local board members 
get paid, it's an all-volunteer organization, and the quantity and 
quality of what you get depends strongly on your volunteers.

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Geoff Hart   ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)
www.geoff-hart.com
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