Apathy rules!

Let's Go CiB!........Or not.

A couple of months ago I wrote a piece in CiB's monthly journal - Communicators - on the Catch 22 facing the organisation. We have around 1200 members, though fewer than 5% or truly active in the sense of doing something to move the organisation forward.

We need to move the organisation on to a platform where it is the first stop in the UK for all issues related to internal communications. To do that, CiB needs to be seen as the leader in continuing professional development (not just for IC pros, but for all managers with a foot in IC). We also need to be seen as a credible home for leading edge research - whether that's as a research sponsor or publisher.

But with only about 60 proactive members - and most of those in agencies where involvement comes with a tacit aspect of business development (and I'm very much in that space) it's hard to get anything moving. So I put out a plea or a challenge or even a request for more people to get involved. The response? A very big, fat nothing. Well, almost nothing. One person has sent me some information on membership recruitment and retention. But that's it.

Then last week, I found out I'd been elected by my peers for another year on council. Out of the successful candidates, I polled about in the middle. So far so good until you realise that i got 46 votes. Out of an electorate of 1200, 79 people voted. That's pathetic by any standard.

I don't know what it will take to light the fire for CiB, but for whatever reason, it's not happening at present. Too many people seem happy to sit and wait for professional accreditation and high class research to land in their laps without putting anything other than their membership fee back in.

without putting more in, CiB will not grow. And if it doesn't grow it will not be able to deliver what communicators want or need. If that's the case, someone else will fill that gap and CiB as an organisation will be redundant. That's rather depressing.