Annual Report

2010 was a year of continued streamlining for the Institute, as we completed back office development work and began to focus on strategy that will allow us to better meet current and future growth. Our objective remains to do so without sacrificing the nimbleness and flexibility required to effectively serve the needs of a rapidly evolving profession.

Some of the year’s highlights:

  • Organization: 2010 was a year for changes as we hired a new Membership Coordinator, retained an association management firm to handle back-office details, secured liability insurance, documented treasury procedures and hired a new bank and a new accounting firm.
  • Membership: We ended the year with 1,449 members in 48 countries. Our member renewal rate was 51% versus 45% in 2009 and 44% in 2008. This is a loyalty measure based on the number of eligible members that chose to renew in a given year. The result indicates that members are more likely to renew than they have been in previous years.
  • Infrastructure: Member database transition is progressing. We have secured a lifetime license to aMember and have completed a series of tests. Implementation is expected by Spring 2010. A full-scale review and strategic plan for the IA Library and the iainstitute.org website is underway in preparation for a migration to an integrated Drupal-based system.
  • Communications: Peter Morville helped us launch a new public initiative called Explain IA. The result was a contest open to the public in which IA Institute members judged entries ranging from diagrams, videos and prose.
  • Events: IDEA 2010 was held at the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia, PA, USA, and continues to exceed our expectations with regards to quality, attendance, and income. We also had a considerable presence at the IA Summit in Phoenix, and sponsored various other events around the world.
  • Partnerships: We expanded our list of event, education and product partners.
  • Initiatives: Our member initiatives continued to flourish. We’ve been working to handle the growth in some of our programs, particularly the mentoring program and events/webinars. One area of promise is in developing two-way relationships between research and practice through initiatives that connect professional speakers with student groups and academic research with business practices. Meanwhile, we continued making back-end improvements to our mentoring registration system and streamlining our resources and translations initiative processes, leveraging our new Volunteer Wiki and the IA Library.

We closed the year with a clearer understanding of the challenges and opportunities before us. Over the next year, we look forward to continue improving our infrastructure and partnership opportunities to better serve our members and the IA profession. We thank you for being a part of it all, and look forward to keep working with you to help our profession flourish.

Read the full report .

This page was last modified on April 6, 2009 03:07 PM.