OPEG Meeting Minutes

Minutes for meeting of OPEG Board of Trustees 6-22-07 Conference Call

Present: Rob Fischer, Rick George, Randy Leite, Debbie Crawford, Chip Partridge, Kelly Burgess, Shiloh Turner, and Jan Upton.

Review of Minutes: April minutes approved. Reviewed May Spring Exchange minutes. [UPDATE: Additions from Randy about the financial report numbers and point that Debbie made about "recruiting a friend to OPEG" have been added.] Permission given to post April minutes on the web page.

Discussion of Changes in Board Membership: Sandy Lock resigned her Member At-Large position on the Board via e-mail on 6/5/07. She has served for three terms, so we have a vacancy. Upon review of the by-laws, the Board by majority vote should fill any vacancy as quickly as possible. Our normal approach is to look at the most recent election. Rick George had the highest number of votes among those running but not elected for an At-Large position. Board members had quite a bit of discussion via e-mail prior to the Board meeting to verify that the process was completely open and consistent with the OPEG by-laws. Chip had made the motion via e-mail for Rick to complete Sandy's term. This was seconded by Randy. There was no opposition to the motion. Rick George will serve the remainder of Sandy's term. We will include an article in the August newsletter thanking Sandy for her service and listing the new Board members.

Treasurer's Report - Randy Leite: Total revenue year-to-date through June is $17, 929.86. We're running about $3,330 below what we budgeted. The expenses are below as well. Outstanding revenue at that time of the Financial Statement was $714.00 (Randy has since received a few payments) and outstanding expenses was $179.90. All the Spring Exchange bills have now been paid. We're about $910 to the negative on the Exchange, but this was offset by memberships. We might want to eventually discuss whether we need to adjust our fee structure. We are going to come out pretty close where we want to be, a balanced budget for the year, and slightly to the good. The $714 expected revenue is counted in the total income. There was a question about whether our membership number has dropped. [UPDATE: Randy checked on the membership counts after the meeting and sent the numbers to Board members via e-mail. Our current membership count is 130, which is down from 157 in 2005-2006 and 171 in 2004-2005.) Board members were surprised that we lost money on the Spring Exchange, as we expected to come out slightly ahead. Randy will check on non-renewals and the numbers that are new. We may also want to communicate with people who are not renewing. Send e-mail to people that did not rejoin. Chip could send that out. We may also need to have more discussion about expenses.

Membership Committee Report - Debbie Crawford: Rick mentioned his and Debbie's contacts with the Drug Free Alliance, which might result in some additional members. Identify organizations that we really want to target. We also need to follow-up with the people who aren't signing up again. We keep bringing in new people to conferences. Every time when Debbie asks, "How many are new?" at the meetings, over half raise their hands. We are kind of churning with respect to our membership numbers and we need to figure this out.

Randy's latest membership count shows 130. Since the fiscal year ends September 30, the fall workshop will be in new fiscal year. Aside from these two events, what are the benefits of OPEG? This is an issue that we struggle with. It is written out in the brochure.

Note that detailed membership recruitment/renewal ideas are listed at the end of the minutes.

Debbie is going to set up a meeting with Rick to discuss all these ideas about membership. She is then going to send out an e-mail to see if others would like to work further on some of the proposed activities.

Program Committee Report - Rob (since Marsha was absent):

Spring Exchange - Overall, the evaluations were positive. Described as "one of the best" conferences we had. Most of the complaints had to do with the logistics (e.g., not enough time between sessions to move to another session) and not the content. It was almost like we had to too many quality presenters to fit into the time allotted-a good problem to have. Some of the low scores were due to presenters not allowing time for discussion and questions. There was one complaint about one speaker going way over the time. Thirty minute sessions are too short. There needs to be 10-minute lead time between sessions. Ninety-three percent rated the session highly (a 4 or a 5, where 5 is high). Is there anything we can do to better prepare our presenters? For national conferences, there are details about how things are going to be run, the number of handouts needed, and guidelines regarding the actual presentation. In addition, this was the first conference where we had more than enough presenters, and in retrospect, maybe we did not handle this very well. In the future, perhaps we should do more screening and select fewer presenters. Perhaps we need to develop more detailed guidelines for presenters, including limiting the number of presenters in a session. The Program Committee needs to look at this.

Chip also noted that we have changed a lot of things. He offered to review prior evaluation feedback results and will check with Tom Archer to see if the archive results are available. Shiloh asked if we share the feedback with the presenters. We have not consistently shared the feedback with presenters. The current version of the survey did not open-ended responses tied to individual presentations. In addition, the skip patterns need to be changed so that only one "did not attend" response is needed if one did not participate in a session.

Overall, it was a good conference. The complaints were less about content and more about logistics. We, of course, want to make it better.

Fall 2007 Workshop: Rob asked if there were any suggestions for the Program Committee. Chip reviewed the Exchange survey results. There was general interest in all the topics. He was surprised that the response was as high as it was on qualitative research. There was equal interest in qualitative and quantitative. Chip has been in contact with Naomi Robbins as a possible keynote. Her focus is on how to display information. It is similar to what we did in the spring, but it would focus more on skill building. She does a lot of work with lay audiences on how to effectively present information. She has written a book on use different software packages to display data graphically. Bill Cleveland, the developer of S and S+, recommended her as a good person to present on applied work. We need to decide soon if we want Naomi to be the keynote. She has been holding the date for several months. Rob asked if she would be doing skills building, actually showing people how to do things. Chip confirmed that she would. [UPDATE: The Program Committee agreed that Naomi was a good choice and the Board approved Naomi as the keynote via e-mail on 7/3/07.]

Other Business:

Board Member Assignments for 2007-08

• Elections Chair - Chip
• Awards Chair - Kelly
• OPEG newsletter Chair - Rick and Debbie are working on the newsletter. It will come out in August.
• Membership Chair - Debbie. Rick offered to assist. Debbie plans to set up a meeting with Rick in July to discuss the ideas about to improve membership recruitment and retention.

OPEG By-Laws

We need to review and update. Everyone except for Shiloh has a copy. Rob is going to scan the document and put it into electronic form. He is going to send out sections and ask Board members to volunteer to review and suggest updates. Rob will be the point person on the by-law revisions. We may need to have a separate call to review and vote on the changes. The entire membership will need to vote on some of changes, but the Executive Committee can approve most of the operating policy changes. Rob would like to complete this by the end of December.

Brainstorming for 2007-2008

Rob has been asked to do a regional meeting in the Cleveland. We had discussed doing such regional meetings and agreed that doing something more informal such as a luncheon, with the Board members in the area taking the lead on it, as a possible option. We agreed that doing such regional activities once a year should be sufficient, as organizing such events is a lot of work. Rob will move forward with setting up a meeting in Cleveland. Such activities can also be used for recruitment.

Rob noted that Case Western is starting a part-time doctoral program. Would there be a problem with posting this information on the OPEG web page. His concern was that it is not an evaluation degree. Several people in OPEG, however, have asked him about it. Jan will put a link on the web site. We cannot send out e-mail announcements weekly, as we do not want to overwhelm members. Chip and Jan will set up a regular e-mail communication notice for members to bring their attention to OPEG web site updates, which 1-2 times a month.

Next Meeting: Friday, August 10th, 2007 from 10 a.m. to noon at Maryhaven in Columbus.

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Submitted by: Jan Upton

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OPEG Membership Recruitment and Renewal Ideas (6/22/07)

• Randy will check on non-renewals and the numbers that are new. We may also want to communicate with people who are not renewing. Send e-mail to people that did not rejoin. Chip could send that out. We may want to send an e-mail survey to non-renewals, asking about the reasons they did not rejoin.
• Contact universities that have evaluation programs. Encourage students to participate (emphasize that membership is only $20/year and we could do more to get this message out to students). Perhaps we could have a student section. One benefit for students is that they can put membership and presentations on their resumes. We may want to add a Student Award. We could also consider adding a scholarship to the spring meeting.
• Another possibility would be organizational memberships in which a non-profit group gets several memberships for a single fee. It is in the interest of human service organizations to have OPEG.
• We need to also better define our goal. In principle, our goal is to get people to make a commitment regardless of whether they attend our conferences. We have not been able to cross this hurdle. Part of it is that we need to establish ongoing communication with members as well as others who may not be members but who are involved in evaluation-related activities. We need to put more emphasis on the value of promoting high quality evaluation statewide. That is the rationale for participation in OPEG. We need to convince members of the value of providing continuous support that goes beyond participating in the meetings.
• Several of us are at universities or with non-profits, and there are opportunities to do such presentations that describe evaluation as well as the value of OPEG. Having an OPEG PowerPoint would be helpful. Rob said he had one that might be appropriate with the addition of a few slides. If we agreed on a consistent message and put the OPEG logo on this PowerPoint, we could possibly use this in various presentations. Rob will send the PowerPoint to Chip, but it sounds like it needs further review by the entire Board.
• Shiloh is going to work on distributing/developing a non-membership distribution contact list. Her organization also has an e-mail distribution list that includes people whose work involves evaluation. Jan/Chip can also share the Evaluation Network file.
• Rob mentioned that another issue that has come up is that people new to OPEG often do not feel very integrated into the organization. We might want to set aside about 15 minutes at each meeting to introduce them to OPEG.
• Jan also suggested that it should be easy to identify new people by their name tag, so that Board members and others can make a point of speaking to them and making them feel welcome. Debbie noted that this had come before and that the churning in our membership may be partly due to people not feeling part of the organization.