Harnessing the Power of Technology

The IPMS (UK) Magazine is the only communication tool that reaches our entire membership. For this reason, amongst many others, the magazine will remain our primary tool for communicating with our members and asking their views on a range of subjects for some years to come. There are however occasions when we need to engage with our members more rapidly than a bi-monthly magazine will allow us to. In the past we have undertaken mailshots to the whole membership if the requirement falls between the magazines we publish, but this inevitably costs a significant amount of money.

In the current climate, with no shows and few meetings, the Executive still needs to be able to understand members’ views on a variety of issues, sometimes at short notice. With that in mind we are going to experiment with the use of some online survey technology. We appreciate that not all members have provided us with a contact email and may not wish to do so. However, we believe we can contact around three-quarters of the membership by email so it should give us a representative sample of opinion across the Society.

Our first survey will be about the IPMS Magazine. We’ll use it to test the viability of this type of survey before deciding on whether to use it for other, similar projects. In the next week to ten days, you may receive an email from surveys@ipmsuk.org. This will contain a link to the survey.

If you do not get an email then either the message has gone to your spam folder, or we do not have a valid, up-to-date email address for you.

(You can notify the Membership Secretary of your email address using the form at https://ipmsuk.org/membership/amend-membership/)

We do not intend that this method of communication will replace any of our existing avenues for contacting members. We’d very much like you to take part in these occasional surveys, but also appreciate that not everyone may wish to.

John Tapsell

IPMS (UK) Publicity Officer

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