IABC - International Association of Business Communication, Wellington, New Zealand

Speech notes for President’s speech at the official IABC Wellington launch.

Hello everyone! I’m Lucy Sanderson-Gammon, President of IABC Wellington, and on behalf of the Board, I would like to welcome you all here to celebrate the official launch of our new chapter.

It’s really exciting for us to have got to this stage. When we held our very first board meeting in November last year, there were 14 members at large in the Greater Wellington region. The board and I thought that if we managed to get established and have 100 per cent increase in membership within the first year, we would be doing well.

As it turned out, we doubled the target in less than half the time – we now have 51 members – and growing!

That level of growth is really encouraging for us, and it’s also good news for members of course, because the more members we have, the more opportunities there are for networking and sharing best practice with colleagues.

So, thank you to all our new members for your support, and also those long time members who have encouraged us for rekindling IABC here in New Zealand.

On that note… there are a few others I would like to acknowledge before running through the programme and introducing you to our speakers.

Firstly, there is no chapter without a board of volunteers to run it. We’re really lucky to have a dedicated group of professionals giving their time to IABC Wellington. So, I’d just like to thank and introduce you to our board – can you please stand as I say your name so people can see who you are:

• Our vice president and membership chair, Paul Rayner.
• Taking care of Professional Development is Julia Napier.
• Our Communications Director, Anna Kominik.
• Our Treasurer – Shona Brown.
• Our Webmaster is Simon Pleasants.
• And, our Administration support until two weeks ago was Zena Groom – but Zena has taken a six-month secondment opportunity in Sydney. So we’re really pleased to have Luke Thoms volunteer for this role. Thanks Luke! Thanks all of you!

I can also announce this evening some very good news. We are really pleased to tell you that Media Monitors has generously offered us a wonderful sponsorship package to become IABC Wellington’s Principal Sponsor for 2007/08. Brendon Swale and Linn Allan from Media Monitors, can you please stand so people can see who you are? A huge thank you to you, and I think it is a very fitting partnership, given the emphasis that both IABC and Media Monitors puts on professionalism and accountability in terms of measuring and showing value for service.

Now, to our programme and speakers. Shortly I will hand you over to Bish Mukherjee, who will do the honours and officially launch our new chapter.

Adrian Cropley will then talk to us about the benefits of our Australia/NZ IABC connection, and then our keynote speaker, Lorri Lennon, will talk to us about communicating in a changing environment. There will be time for questions and then more drinks and nibbles afterwards.

Hopefully you will have picked up a flyer with details of our esteemed speakers, so I won’t give you too much more information about them. But I will just take this opportunity to acknowledge the support they have each given to our chapter.

Bish has been Regional Director Asia/Pacific Region since 2002, and on the IABC executive board since 2001. He has been a huge support to us getting up and running, and has taken every opportunity to sing our praises at the highest levels of the association. In fact, he was so impressed with our efforts he had the executive board change the rules and allow us to become a fully fledged chapter in record time! Thank you Bish.

And it’s also quite fitting to have Lorri Lennon is here with us tonight. It was nearly a year ago today that I met up with Lorri and Meryl David, another long time advocate of IABC, in a hotel in Sydney after they presented at a two-day Masterclass in Internal Communications. As nice as it was to have a reason to visit Australia, I was talking to them about how good it would be if we were able to access more professional development opportunities from home, and that’s when they introduced me to IABC. So thank you for that Lorri!

It was at that same time that Paul Rayner and I met Adrian Cropley, who was chairing the event, and at that time, was Vice President of IABC Victoria in Melbourne. Adrian suggested that perhaps Paul and I might like to consider getting a chapter going in Wellington.

Well, yeah, sure. One day maybe… Paul and I went off back to Wellington saying we should meet up again sometime for coffee and talk through the idea. But I’m sure Paul will agree with me that our idea of ‘sometime’ was maybe in a few months, or even years, when life wasn’t so busy!

However… Adrian’s definition of ‘sometime’ was more along the lines of ‘Now’s good!’.

Obviously he has the gift of persuasion because in just a matter of months we were actually were up and running – due in no small part to his encouragement, mentoring and contagious enthusiasm! So a very big, huge thank you to you Adrian!

So – that’s it from me – you’ll be pleased to hear! I’ll now hand over to Bish.

Thank you.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 10:55 pm and is filed under Events, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.