Friday 30 May 2008

What are the real benefits of being a member of the Society?

This week the Society launched its new project to look at both developing the benefits of Society Membership and to investigate whether we should look to broaden the opportunity for members with a more general interest in the weather to be able to have stronger links with the Society. There are some really interesting concepts in here about the future direction of the Society – but that’s for a later blog entry.

The starting point for our discussions at the Project Board was to review the current list of benefits. It’s the first time I’ve seen us list all of them in one place, and several things struck me. The first was how many we have. The second, which follows on almost immediately, was how bad we are at publicising all these. For example did you know that as a Member of the Society you are entitles to discounts on computer software, Wiley books and weather instruments from the Weather Shop if ordered through the Society.

The third thing that occurred to me was how many members we have that join the Society, not necessarily to take advantage of the personal benefits, but to support their professional and learned Society and the work it does for meteorology. Whilst they may not benefit directly certainly Meteorology does.

For instance our work with the Science Council and Government in improving the quality of curriculum resources that foster children’s interest in studying science that’s well taught in the classroom, helping to promote careers in science and funding programmes that help those scientist convert into meteorology, the development of professional qualification and accreditation schemes that drive up the standard in service provision and instrumentation, the contribution we make to groups like the UK Flight Safety Committee, and our work to support the policy work of Government and the Select Committees of Parliament, with some interesting work recently on the Climate Change Bill.

That’s only some of the work we do behind the scenes, and (although we can always be better at what we do) it reminded me of what a fantastic organisation the Society is, what influence it does carry and what an interesting and rewarding job I have.

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