| ICA goes on the prowl for new members Rebounding from four money-losing years, the once mighty ICA seeks new blood
By Douglas Welch Once considered an exclusive club for telecommunications high rollers, the International Communications Association (ICA) is now aiming to appeal to a broader audience and regain the luster it lost during the past few years. The nonprofit group took a step in the right direction last year when its finances returned to the black after four years of running in the red, which forced the ICA to dip into cash reserves to cover operating costs. ''We have made a major turnaround,'' says Woody Randall, ICA chairman. ''[And now] we are launching a membership drive to pick it up some more.'' The group has modified some of its bylaws and is stressing its educational programs as a membership benefit that complements its telecommunications lobbying efforts. Perhaps the most noteworthy and symbolic gesture is the removal of a long-standing bylaw that makes membership open only to corporations that spend at least $1 million a year on telecommuni-cations services. Even though more companies are reaching that threshold today, the bylaw was viewed as an impediment to luring new members, if for no other reason than the group was perceived as being for big spenders only. Founded in 1948, the ICA has always gone after the biggest companies. Back then, when the state-of-the-art network technology was plain old telephone service delivered through the Bell System, large companies wanted to band together to gain power in dealing with Ma Bell and influence government regulations. The coupling of deregulation and the growing importance of data communications in the late 1980s caused a number of companies in the ICA to question the value of membership, especially as the group remained focused on telecommunications issues. ''A lot of members dropped out because they thought the benefits had diminished,'' Randall says. ''There was a feeling that ICA was a 'good old boy' organization. We've tried to dispel that in the last couple of years.'' Even now, Randall says he still hears comments that the ICA touts the benefits of its lobbying efforts too heavily. ''Some of our older members are saying 'I get that benefit whether I'm a member or not.' '' While Randall acknowledges that is true, he says it's still membership dues and other income that provides the money to fuel the effort. Business factors also took their toll on membership. When ICA companies merged, two members suddenly became one. That happened quite a bit, Randall says. Also, when ICA firms faced budget-cutting pressures, annual dues became a cutable expense. The dues are now $975 per company, up from $400 to $500 in the late 1980s. Dues kept going up as membership went down. The ICA now has 400 member companies, a drop from 750 companies when the group hit its membership peak in the mid-1980s. Because each corporation can appoint five members, the total membership is near 2,500 now, as opposed to 3,500 then. As membership dropped, so did attendance at the annual ICA conference and exhibition. Consequently, vendors stopped signing up to exhibit at the show, causing a drain on cash reserves. To curtail costs, the ICA signed a five-year agreement in 1995 to merge its conference with the Supercomm show, which caters to telephone companies. Under the agreement, the ICA sells space on the Supercomm show floor to vendors that target end users and runs a series of educational conferences, seminars and tutorials. At this years Supercomm in New Orleans (June 1 5), the ICA will have 40 to 50 educational offerings, including two-day tutorials, one-day miniconferences and one-hour break-out sessions covering everything from Internet and intranet technologies to career management. The ICA also lost members when it was too slow to shift its educational focus from managing telephone systems to data networks 10 years ago. How- ever, Randall says 80% of the group's educational programs now address data communications.''Had we stayed focused just on voice, as we were in the past, we would have been gone a long time ago,'' he says. ''It's hard to draw a line between voice and data today. We all have to be knowledgeable across the board. One of the biggest successes in data network training was the introduction six years ago of the ICA Summer Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. It is a weeklong technical workshop with laboratories and hands-on sessions designed for nonmanagement staff, covering issues such as building large router-based networks. ''Its more of a worker-bee educational program than a management one,'' Randall says. ''We have labs with working equipment furnished by several vendors, and we have instructions in those labs. It is actually a touchy-feely type of thing. The classroom sessions are very high-tech and focused on the how-to side of things as opposed to theory. Last year's summer programs were on LAN/WANs, how to install, run and manage them.'' The ICA has a new Web site where members can engage in discussions, read news related to ICA issues and explore links to other relevant sites. Access to more detailed material, including a job bank, is available to members via a password-protected system. To some members, the value of belonging to the ICA is a personal thing. ''Probably the biggest selling point of ICA has been networking with my counterparts,'' says Ruth Michalecki, director of telecommunications at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. The problem today is that fewer people outside the telecommunications industry know much about the ICA. ''It is amazing that when I go around the country and attend other shows and introduce myself to vendors and users, they don't even know what the ICA is, Randall says. ''They have never heard of it. That just blows me away when that happens. We've been in existence for 50 years and people don't know about us now.'' The membership drive and other measures are key elements in the ICA's plans to enhance its services in preparation for the group's 50th anniversary next year.
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ICA Web site Welch is a computer consultant and freelance writer in Van Nuys, Calif. He can be reached at dewelch@ earthlink.net. |