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Geotechnical News • December 2012
www.geotechnicalnews.com
ASFE NEWS
external expansion was made possible
principally by the generosity of those
firms and individuals who joined our
Fund for the Future program
, agreeing
to pay four years’ worth of dues over a
three-year period. This fund is priming
the pump.
Our new Membership Director/Orga-
nizational Relations Director Colleen
Knight has been on board close to one
year. I am delighted to report that, by
year’s end, we will have added about
25 firms to our membership. That’s
almost a 10% increase. At the same
time, our membership attrition has
been the lowest in many years, despite
the economy and despite mergers and
acquisitions. We have many addi-
tional prospects for membership. As
the economy improves, I expect even
larger gains will occur.
Insofar as our external focus is
concerned, we started by allowing
more outside groups to enter our
tent by expanding our
membership
categories
to include geoprofessional
contractors without a design capa-
bility, government employees, and
students. And thanks to the efforts
of our External Relations Commit-
tee, we have engaged and energized
more than a dozen allied organizations
and, together, we are
launching The
Geoprofessional Foundation
, a multi-
organization collaboration designed to
spread the word about the importance
and value of geoprofessionals. And
not just the value of geoprofessionals
in private practice, but also those in
industry, in government, in education
as both instructors and students, and in
the world of construction. Our mantra?
Save time, save money, and reduce
risk by wisely selecting, engaging, and
deploying geoprofessionals, a thought
I recently heard expressed in the very
apt expression, “Cheap geoprofes-
sional services are expensive.”
This year we completed our second
strategic plan for the fiscal years 2012-
13 through 2014-15
. I commend the
Board for its great work. The new plan
clarifies ASFE’s purpose by putting it
all into one statement: “Help geopro-
fessionals maximize their importance
and value to the marketplace, achieve
business excellence, and manage risk.”
Our new plan has four strategic goals:
(1) increase membership; (2) develop
outreach to alliances, clients, and
influencer groups; (3) achieve deeper
and broader engagement of member
firms; and (4) enhance educational
resources. It’s as ambitious as the first
and I have every faith that, three years
from now, our president will be say-
ing, “We did it again.”
All of the above are hardly the only
jewels in this year’s crown. Let me
highlight a few more.
• We initiated a
new class of New
Leaders
who bring as much en-
thusiasm and creativity to the task
as the “old new leaders,” many of
whom are now fully integrated into
ASFE as leaders of our organiza-
tion.
• Through our Nondues Income Task
Force, we expanded our meeting
sponsorship efforts based on mem-
bers’ reports that they found the ex-
hibits informative and helpful.
• We’ve acted on another Nondues
Income Task Force recommenda-
tion and are planning to accept ad-
vertising in NewsLog and on our
website, as most other groups do,
to make members aware of what’s
available and also to help us gener-
ate additional funding sources.
• Through our Education Committee,
we are initiating a video-education
effort at our
Annual Meeting in Or-
lando.
We’ll make videos of key
presentations available to all mem-
bers.
• The Education Committee and
Membership Committee combined
to establish a new series of
ASFE
webinars
that have proven to be ex-
traordinarily popular. We plan to do
18 of these in the coming year.
• The Education Committee also pub-
lished our outstanding new
ASFE
Resource Catalog
. Not only is it
easy to use, its table of contents
alone explains why ASFE is such
an amazing business-focused orga-
nization. There’s no other organiza-
tion out there that even comes close
to doing what ASFE has done and
continues to do.
• The Construction Materials Engi-
neering and Testing Committee
once again performed yeoman ser-
vice. It developed
Important Infor-
mation about Quality Assurance
for insertion into ASFE-Member
Firms’ CoMET reports and other
quality-assurance
deliverables.
It prepared
Project Quality As-
surance: A Message to Owners
and
Project Quality Assurance: A
Message to Architects, Civil Engi-
neers, and Structural Engineers
, in
the process creating a whole new
approach to preparing our mes-
sage flyers; an approach we’ll use
this coming year to update them
all. The Committee also prepared
ASFE Practice Alert 52: Initial
Curing of Concrete Test Specimens
in the Field: Who Is Responsible
for What?
and recently published
the newest version of its
model
agreement
.
• The CoMET Committee also de-
veloped a PowerPoint presenta-
tion template Member Firms can
customize to tell clients, those who
influence clients, and colleagues
about the value to be derived from
CoMET consultants when they are
wisely selected, engaged, and de-
ployed. The Geotechnical Commit-
tee and Environmental Committee
have done likewise. We’ll unveil
the three presentations at our An-
nual Meeting in Orlando.
• The Emerging Issues and Trends
Committee held its Crystal Ball
Workshop last summer and has
now published
Practice Alert 53:
The Crystal Ball Workshop: Ten
Certain Trends To Consider Now
.
The Committee is working on its
next Practice Alert, focusing on
trends that are less than certain.
• The Business Practices Committee
was hard at work, too, developing
meeting programs, conducting the