SMG Symposium & Board Retreat

Recently, the Seattle Metals Guild Symposium Committee and Board had a day-long Strategic Planning Retreat to talk about the upcoming symposium and the future of our guild. Thanks to Lynn Vandeberg for making this happen! Here are some highlights:

The goal of the Retreat was to bring members of the Symposium Committee and the Board together to discuss, brainstorm and attempt to develop an answer the following question:

“What is needed to ensure the future success and sustainability of the SMG Symposium and by extension, the Guild?”

Challenges:

- Growing competition for our audience’s attention
- Our audience has become extremely comfortable communicating via a screen
- Lack of young members and abundance of inactive members

Ideas for Improvement:

-  Identify what success looks like for the Guild and the Symposium

-  Conduct outreach to understand which offerings and formats younger people and others, find valuable Schools, guilds, etc.

- Focus groups

-  Partner with other guilds and organizations that run symposium-like events

- Member directories, lessons learned, best practices

-  Adjust the Guild’s offerings to reflect learnings from outreach and industry partnerships

-  Better utilize the significant leadership skills of the board members

-  Actively recruit new members and re-engage inactive members

- Partner with appropriate local museums and maker organizations for possible regional events and exposure

-  Improve the level of collaboration between the Board and Symposium Committee

-  Develop a 5-year plan

If you have any suggestions, or would like to get more involved with these kinds of conversations, please email allaboard@seattlemetalsguild.org