I am not a professional speaker by any means, and during the 2022 ASPE Convention & Expo, I had a couple opportunities to prove that to the Chapter Delegates! One of those times was during my Vice President, Membership candidate speech. What I should have done was read my speech as I wrote it—I would have been able to share the complete message and stay under four minutes. What I did do was look up, ad lib, run long, and miss some stuff that I felt was really important, so I want to share the full speech with you here because I want you to take in my whole message.
Before we start, for those who were there, you witnessed me starting and finishing my speech with some excerpts from a Dwight Shrute speech (from The Office). I don’t feel it is appropriate here, but if you want to see “Dwight’s speech,” check out The Office, season 2 , episode 17.
Now to my speech:
I’m Jason McDonald. I’m the current ASPE VP Membership, and I am quite sure that you should vote for me to serve you for two more years.
Thank you all for being here today, for sharing your weekend meditation time with us, and for your service to your Chapters and to Society. Thank you for the sacrifices each of you are making by being here this weekend. Society would not exist without you.
To the first-time Delegates, welcome! I hope this Business Meeting and the Convention experience as a whole blows your minds! And I hope you are here today because you volunteered, not because you were volun-told.
How many of you are here because you are passionate about ASPE?
I hope that you are not afraid to let that passion show here this weekend, at your Chapter events, and everywhere else you go. I hope that each one of you tells others, “Hey, ASPE is a pretty great organization, and I think you should come see what we are all about.” Show them what your Chapter and Society have to offer. And once you hook them, point them to the Join ASPE page!
And it seems like a lot of you have been doing that already. The state of ASPE membership is strong. Society had a hiccup through the pandemic, but I am very happy to report to you that as of this morning, ASPE is at 6,564 members, our highest level in nearly three years, and we continue to grow. That membership growth is all because of you!
In addition, Society has made some big strides for membership in the past couple of years including an improved new member application and member renewal experience and increased communication with Chapter VPMs via the Membership Council Community on ASPE Connect.
Something that I am very excited about is that ASPE just rolled out a new member application review system in August that will save ASPE Staff countless hours (others made this happen—I just have the good fortune of being the messenger). Gone are the one to two weeks of waiting for a new membership to be processed after VPM approval!
If you vote for me, new focuses for the NEXT two years include:
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- Encouraging more Chapters to recognize members’ ASPE birthdays (I’ll be 28 in November.)
- Giving more assistance to struggling Chapters
- Helping Chapters:
- Find additional sources of new members
- Attract young members
- Entice Chapter involvement
- Entice members to want to serve in Chapter leadership roles
- In collaboration with other Society Officers, focusing on member burnout and how we can deal with it and advocate for ourselves to overcome it
Everything Society does, everything we (all of us) do, is membership. Let’s make sure we show appreciation of our Chapter members and let’s celebrate our membership in ASPE, our passion for ASPE, and our pride in being plumbing engineers, designers, and others in the plumbing engineering community.
I believe that if the Chapters put a solid product out there and let their passion be seen, our members will market ASPE to others who will then want to join. And if we engage and treat our members right, both the Chapters and Society, our members will want to remain members.
I have always and will always believe that Strong Chapters = a Strong ASPE.
We got ourselves back over 6,500 members. Let’s keep growing. The more members we have means the more Staff and resources we have, which means more useful tools, publications, education, and benefits that ASPE can offer.
With that, I ask you to vote for me to be your next Society VP Membership. Let’s strive for greatness together!
If you made it to the end, thank you for reading the whole thing. If you made it to the end and are still not an ASPE member, please click the link to join today: aspe.org/membership-global-community/join/application.
