Member Services Committee

The Member Services committee met at the end of July to discuss our strategy for the coming year. Our goal is to retain at least 90% of our existing members and add an additional 25% for the coming year or 16 new members. To do that, we will need each member's help as follows:

• Bring prospective members you meet at other events or in your day-to-day business activities to a dinner meeting. Now when you bring a guest, the guest pays the member price of $30 as long as you register in advance.
• Tell us about someone to whom you would like us to send information. The NJAWBO state website now allows prospective members to register as a prospect online. We are notified so that individual is included on our mailing lists and information is sent to her. State's website is www.njawbo.org.
• Let us know what your expectations are and if we as a chapter are meeting them. We realize we compete for your time with your other commitments. We want to continue to make our meetings and services valuable to you.

We are also revamping our mentoring program for new members. Linda Gardner is heading that initiative and needs volunteers to help a new member meet other members and learn about the services and benefits of NJAWBO. We want to make it easy for our new members to get into the swing of this supportive and dynamic chapter of businesswomen. This is a two-meeting commitment. Please contact Linda for further information on how you can help.

Our Prospective Member Open Houses are still wonderful ways to network with potential new members. Our last Open House was on Tuesday August 6th and was hosted by Maria Romero, Co-Owner of Spa Therapia. We had a wonderful networking discussion followed by a tour of the facility. We are hopeful we will have 4 new members from that. If you would like to host a Prospective Member Open House, please let Amanda Puppo know, as she will be coordinating the Open Houses. The next one is October 17th and then every other month beginning in January 2003. We need members to attend these as well since we talk about how NJAWBO has benefited each of us. Please consider coming to a few when you see our announcements for them. There is no cost to you or the prospective member.

Finally, we will be holding a brief networking session before the dinner meeting on September 19th with the members that have joined the Mercer Chapter during the past program year. Our goal is to get to know each and every one as well as find out what their expectations were in joining NJAWBO, whether we have met them, and what would be of value to them going forward. That will be held at 5:15 before the dinner meeting and each will receive an invitation from the Committee to attend. If you are one of those individuals, please make a note of this now. We really need your input.

I want to take this opportunity to thank each person on the Member Services Committee, Eileen Entin, Linda Gardner, Linda Principe, Amanda Puppo and Liz Scafa, for all the time and resources they have donated as we developed the initiatives we need in order to build this chapter.

- Paula Gould, VP Member Services