President's Corner

Susan Clough
CCBO President

April, 2010

CCBO Is On The Move!

Winter has passed and spring has arrived!  The sky is blue and the grass is green.  It’s a time for new beginnings.  Your CCBO Board of Directors is feeling much the same.  We met in Hilton Head, SC for our spring board meeting and enthusiasm was high!  We committed ourselves to achieving success on three strategies this year, we’re preparing for an outstanding annual conference this fall, we’re challenging ourselves to get award nominations in all categories from throughout our membership, and we discussed strategies on how to provide more value to our members during these tough economic conditions.

The three strategies for this year include:

• Increase and improve marketing of CCBO
• Seek additional sponsors and vendors for CCBO
• Continue networking and professional development opportunities for CCBO members

A myriad of ideas have already been generated for each of these strategies as follows:

• Marketing
•  Seek testimonials about CCBO from members, utilize bullet points on the website, explore putting CCBO on social networking sites, update the membership brochure, allow more people per college to participate in each institutional membership
• Sponsors and Vendors
• Create a “Did you know?” booklet/fact book incorporating CCBO history, accomplishments and strategies for the future, host a pre-conference event for vendors to discuss new ideas, create annual giving sponsorship levels
• Professional Development
• Include a no-charge pre-conference event at the annual conference, make programmatic improvements to the Leadership Academy, host hour-long moderated telephone conferences on relevant topics throughout the year

Your board members are actively working on these strategies and hope to implement many of these ideas by the end of the year.  We are now set up on Facebook; become a fan and get current CCBO information.  We are always seeking suggestions and invite you to participate.  Please contact any of the Board members or the National Office if you have an idea to share or a potential vendor or sponsor that we should contact. 

Your board is committed to moving CCBO forward despite the challenges we face in higher education.  We need to pull together to create inventive solutions to our challenges and not back down from them.  We know that the success of our organization is dependent on sharing ideas with members and others who have yet to learn about our organization.  Together we can make significant differences and important contributions to the success of CCBO and our community colleges.