Virtual Snapshot of a Professional Community

By Marc Verhoeve

There has been a great deal written in the past few years about professional networking. Because of the physical and time demands of today’s workplace, it is increasingly difficult to nurture a Face-to-Face (F2F) community. Therefore, the effective use of the Internet has provided a powerful vehicle for creating a virtual professional community. This article is an examination of the electronic backbone to an effective professional community.

The Ontario School Counsellors’ Association (OSCA) is a professional association that supports and advocates for over 1800 school counsellors and guidance teachers, and other educational stakeholders. The counsellors/teachers are located primarily in schools throughout the province; the other stakeholders are in school board offices, government offices, post-secondary institutions, and other educational/commercial venues. Even though we are primarily an Ontario-based association, our membership reaches as far away as Hong Kong.

To maintain this virtual community, there is a sophisticated electronic backbone of communication vehicles required. These include:

• Listserv
• Website
• Members’ Lounge
• eNewsletter
• Magazine

Our listserv is the most vanilla of our communication vehicle, but also the most effective. Messages are circulated three times per week to 1800 desktops. It is used extensively by OSCA, post-secondary institutions, and educational stakeholders to quickly and efficiently disseminate updates and alerts. In addition to its powerful dissemination role, it has symbolized the power of communication among our members: in one instance a post-secondary official made an arbitrary decision about applicant requirements. A challenge published on our listserv, and as a result this official was inundated with a province-wide reaction. He published a retraction of the new procedure in the listserv within the week.

The OSCA website www.osca.ca is a service vehicle for all of our stakeholders: counsellors, students, parents. To give a snapshot of traffic on this site [using our Traffic Meter], here is some data from Jan -Mar, 2008:

Total hits = 2,488,579
Total visitors = 19,330
Referring websites = 628
Highest traffic/day = 8AM – 3PM
Top Browsers used = IE6/ IE7/ Gecko/ MSNBot/ Mozilla Firefox

Not surprisingly, over 70% of our traffic is sourced within Canada. The other major national sources are the United States, Great Britain, Poland and Brazil. Ninety-four percent of our visitors find our site through Google.

The links on our site are chosen by our Board, our webmaster, and our members.

A new addition to our site is our Members’ Lounge, which contains six rooms:

• Directory Room – provides our members with contact information, including email hot-buttons and a colleague search-engine.
• eResource Centre – otherwise known as the “creative commons”, which is a collection of volunteered resources from members and organizations.
• PD Calendar Room – allows members to access details of forthcoming professional development events.
• Survey Pool – contains a survey vehicle for our Board and educational stakeholders, as well as for eVoting during Board elections.
• Cyberstore – the “shelves” of which contain products and services available to members at “members-only” discounts.
• Let’s Chat Room – allows members to share questions, issues, and solutions.

The OSCAction eNewsletter is published five times per year (after each OSCA Board meeting). It contains reports from Executive, Board Committees, and stakeholders [including the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities). Until 5 years ago, it was published in a “bark-based” (paper) format. Publishing deadlines, printing and mailing costs made this an ineffective vehicle. Moving to an electronic platform allows us to eBlast it directly to our members’ desktops and to monitor its effectiveness through our Traffic Meter. Case in point, the past issue was opened by 169 members within an hour of the eBlast!

Our formal magazine, OSCA Today, is published four times per year, and enjoys tremendous popularity. The Ministry of Education has requested reprints of several hundred copies of past issues for distribution at their training sessions throughout the province. Thanks to advertising, this is published and mailed to our members at no cost. In addition, a digital version of each issue is archived in our Members’ Lounge.

In February 2008, OSCA was invited to be a panellist at the annual Technology PDX Event of the Canadian Society of Association Executives (CSAE) because of our “effective use of electronic communication technology within our association.” A vice-president of a major professional publishing firm graded our association a score of 9.7 / 10 in effective association virtual communication.

In this age of fast-lane productivity demands from our clients, professional associations must be technologically nimble in servicing the daily needs of our members…and their clients. We must be adaptable to the use of new cutting-edge networking technology to create an effective backbone to the association’s infrastructure.

The purpose of this article was to provide a detailed snapshot of our communication infrastructure. As with anything in this Virtual Era, all the aforementioned data is already stale dated.

Marc Verhoeve has been in the educational counselling sector for 32 years, He is now semi-retired, and is presently the Executive Director of the Ontario School Counsellors’ Association. His professional avenues include cybertraining consultant for RPP, and private career practitioner.