by Dennis Wilson
This is my final President’s Message to you, our membership. This is a good time to reflect on the past and look forward to the future. During my time in office, we have seen some dramatic changes in the Society.
Willem Hurkmans, our Publications Chairman led his team to develop a totally new, fresh and modern look for the World of Wood. Willem and Mihaly still need your support to provide material to publish for each issue. Ours is a reader written publication so we need members to sit down and write articles so Mihaly can work to put the journal together in a timely manner. This is an area where we need to improve and is where you, the reader, can make a direct impact. I know that I will be attempting to do this in the coming year. If I can do it, I know there are many in our membership that can do it better.
We changed the company that prints our World of Wood saving us about 30% of the printing cost plus giving us a full color publication. They also provide additional editing and mailing benefits that our previous printer did not.
Art Lee and Whitney Wilson have made a new website for the Society and launched it. A very time-consuming job. Our new website is much more in keeping with current website design and look. This is extremely important because most of the people that hear about the IWCS do it through our website. It, along with the World of Wood, needs to put the Society in the best light possible. The website no longer needs a person that is versed in technical details of coding websites. Art is now able to perform most of the tasks necessary himself. Art can use some assistance to spread the workload. If you contact Art and ask what you can do to help, it will not only help him and the Society but be a great way to learn Word Press that you may want to use in other applications.
We now know that we can function perfectly well by separating the Secretary and Treasurer positions and have two individuals perform those duties or combine those jobs into a Secretary/Treasurer position done by one person. This gives the Society much more flexibility in the future should the need arise that we would need/want to separate those positions again.
The Board of Trustees agreed to move all membership renewals to Oct. This is cumbersome to implement and may be confusing to some members but once fully in place will save huge amounts of time and effort for the Secretary/Treasurer, making the job much less time consuming. We are also discussing an idea to further reduce the Secretary Treasurer’s workload in sending dues notices.
Unfortunately, we had to eliminate multi year memberships because we lost money on every one of those memberships. This will eliminate a cost that has to be borne by all other members once all those current multi year memberships expire.
This year we had two candidates to choose from for the office of President Elect. This may be the first time since 2005 that has happened. This is good for the Society to have new people bringing new ideas to the Society’s leadership.
All these changes are the result of many of your officers working to see the need for improvement and then acting on them. Change is never easy and takes the cooperation of many. I want to thank all those who have worked together these past two years to help bring this about. This does not stop here. Our incoming President, Mark Duff, will have other items he wants to implement for the improvement of the Society. I am sure all of us will support him in his new position.