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Chapter Members, As I write this note to you, I am en-route to A’23, the annual AIA Conference on Architecture happening in San Francisco this week. President-Elect, Rida Asfahani and myself are attending to represent the El Paso Chapter as our voting delegates in the Annual Business Meeting and to vote for the 2024 Officers. Thank you for the opportunity to represent the Chapter at the national level. I trust that some of you are also taking this opportunity to make a mid-summer visit to the beautiful City By the Bay. If so — we hope to run into you having a good time there! It’s pretty hard not to and as Anthony Bourdain once said… “Anyone who doesn’t have a good time in San Francisco is pretty much dead to me.”
As we are speaking of conferences — I’ll take a moment to report in from the Texas Society of Architects, Conference Futures Committee which I have begun serving on this year. We have had three meetings thus far, with the most recent being an in person meeting in Austin that I attended in March and an online meeting this past month. The committee has been diligently making plans for the Annual Conference and Design Expo that will be hosted in Houston in 2024. Our primary roles include the nomination and outreach to Keynote Speakers and advising TxA staff to guide the overarching decisions that contribute to the engagement, member experience and success of future conferences. Much of this work is informed by the metrics and data mined from past conferences and accordingly we’ve recently reviewed the data received from the exit surveys of attending members to our “CONNECTION” conference hosted here in El Paso in October, 2022. With a sample survey size of 280 attending TxA members who completing the survey, over 76% were VERY SATISFIED with their experience at the El Paso conference. Over 91% of surveys rated the sessions and tours at our conference to be HIGH or VERY HIGH Quality. Following from these and other survey questions regarding their experience in El Paso over 95% of respondents said they WOULD RECOMMEND our TxA Conference to their friends and colleagues! These outstanding results and other direct feedback provided to TxA staff from attending members will go a long way in the effort to convince the TxA board and staff to bring the Annual Conference back once again. My fellow members serving on the Conference Futures Committee had many positive things to say about the quality of conference that El Paso offered the members of the Society. Many say it has been their favorite conference in memory. Let’s take this moment to bask in the success of what we’ve accomplished. We are the only VOLUNTEER Chapter to host TxA’s Annual Conference, which is notably the second largest annual AIA conference in this country. To do so with such glowing post-op reviews is quite the feat to have pulled off. On behalf of our entire board and committee, kudos to each and every one of you who contributed to that effort! Best Regards,
William Helm, AIA
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