2 SEPTEMBER 2014 • WORLD AQUACULTURE • WWW.WAS.ORG President’s Column I am very proud to introduce myself as President of WAS, in this my first column. For those who don’t know me, I am currently a senior aquaculture R&D manager serving as Program Manager for Seafood Production Innovation with the Australian Seafood Cooperative Research Centre. I hope that many of you were among the 2000+ that availed themselves of the opportunity to visit my hometown of Adelaide for World Aquaculture 2014 and that you enjoyed some good Aussie hospitality. It was very exciting to have World Aquaculture come to my own doorstep, although I have to say that I was not entirely sad when it was all over. Now that the dust has settled on what was another successful meeting — and I would like to take this opportunity personally thank all those that contributed to making it happen — we can now return to the serious business of addressing some of the challenges and opportunities that we face as a professional society in an era of a rapidly changing knowledge economy. The Value Proposition of WAS Membership Most of you reading World Aquaculture will already be members of the Society and will understand why you have joined WAS and know whether or not you will continue as a member in the short to medium term. Membership of the Society remains stable at ~2,000+ which is made up of a large core of long-term members and a smaller cohort of transient members who come and go, often centered around participation in conferences. This membership level stubbornly refuses to grow, despite continued growth in global aquaculture and the services that support it, which continue to expand apace. This issue has been of concern to the Board for some years now. We know that our conferences continue to be popular and are at the core of our role as a modern-day knowledge broker. A number of initiatives have been rolled out over recent years and we have improved some of our products, not least this magazine. So why aren’t we growing, and in particular, why are we not growing membership in the major geographic areas of aquaculture growth outside of the regions where we have strong core membership? A tool I like to use to address a question such as this is to try to analyze the Value Proposition of WAS membership. Here I am treating the Value Proposition as something quite specific, a term that very concisely outlines the key features of WAS membership, a positioning statement that explains what benefits we provide, for who and how we do it uniquely well. The key elements of a value proposition are: • What products or services do we provide? • What is the benefit of this product or service to our members? • Who is the target customer for these products or services? • What makes our offering unique and different? The fact that we are not growing our membership indicates that one or more elements of our value proposition are off target or simply that we are not communicating our value proposition effectively. In regions such as North America, parts of Europe and to a lesser extent Australia, where our core membership is strong (e.g. we normally retain around 1,000 members in North America), there is a tradition of joining professional societies and people join for a number of reasons. Professional societies generally offer access to professional development, public policy influence, leadership development, networking, jobs, personal recognition, marketing and development. Certainly WAS offers most of these elements to a greater or lesser degree, through a range of media. It is very important that we maintain and even improve on the services we provide to these existing core members, but our bigger challenge is that the regions with the greatest potential for significant growth do not have this tradition of professional society membership or that members join for different reasons. I see it as a major responsibility of our Board to critically examine the elements of our value proposition, most particularly to understand what aquaculture professionals in the regions that are underrepresented in our Society want, need and expect from a modern day professional society such as WAS. Enhancing this understanding should enable us to expand, adapt, modify and communicate our value proposition in such a way as to increase our relevance, or the understanding of that relevance, to attract more members. Contents (continued) Society 2 President’s Column 3 Editor’s Note 4 USAS Report 5 Latin American and Caribbean Chapter Report 5 Asian Pacific Chapter Report 70 Conference Calendar 71 Future Conferences and Expositions 72 Advertisers’ Index 72 Membership Application (CONTINUED ON PAGE 4)
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