American Chemical Society
American Chemical Society
LSAC Best Practices Webinar
May 6, 2014
Operator: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to introduce your host, Martin Rudd, Chair of the ACS Committee on Local Section Activities.
Martin Rudd: Thank you very much. Good afternoon. My name is Martin Rudd and I’m the Chair of the ACS Committee on Local Section Activities (LSAC), and Councilor from the Northeast Wisconsin Local Section. LSAC provides a wide range of resources to assist local sections meet the needs of their members. They include a comprehensive website, multiple grant opportunities, and direct assistance with committee members through annual report reviews.
Today, I am pleased to welcome you to the Local Section Best Practices Webinar where we have identified three activities that will be presented by Local Section officers that we think are adaptable and doable in any local-sized section. Our speakers will address how the activity was developed, what went into the planning, if there were any funding resources, and the impact and assessment of the events. All those topics are key to making your planned activity get off to a great start, and we hope this provides a useful follow-up to the Planning Successful Activities workshop that is a featured presentation at the Leadership Institute each year.
I would like to thank each of you for taking the time to be with us this afternoon to help your local section be all that it wants to be.
At this time, I will ask the Operator to give instructions for asking questions. Operator?
Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, if you have any questions at this time, please press the number one key. Again, if you have any questions at this time, please press the number one key.
Martin Rudd: Thank you very much. I would like to encourage each of you to post your questions in the chat area on your screen so that they can be answered immediately. We will also take a few minutes after each speaker, time permitting, and then have a more in-depth question and answer period at the end of the webinar. Remember that we have officers from local sections who helped organize these activities and they are the best experts to help answer those particular questions that you may have.
I would now like to introduce our first speaker, Bob Pertuit. Bob is the Councilor from the Southwest Louisiana Local Section, which is in the small-sized category. His section sponsored a ChemExpo as a National Chemistry Week event. I’ll turn it over to Bob.
Bob Pertuit: Hello. Good evening, good afternoon. I’m glad you are here representing your sections. If we could have the next slide please?
I wanted to talk a little bit about ChemExpo, beginning with the end in mind we’re going to tell you what the end looks like. This is a celebration of National Chemistry Week in which we give the opportunity to every sixth grader in Calcasieu Parish to participate in four hands-on demonstrations, plus observing a liquid air demonstration. We target 2,800 children using 500 volunteers. We’ll have 72 demonstration tables, each experiment will be presented at 18 different tables, there’ll be four leaders per table, plus a gofer, and the children will be there for about 12 minutes, with three minutes provided from them to move from one table to the next. Next slide please?
Okay. The history of this. Lake Charles is a very large industrial complex, having several refineries and all the auxiliary chemical manufacturing for all kinds of commodity chemicals. You can get an idea of the scope of that from the URL that is shown on this slide. They participate heavily in the educational process through such things as teacher institutes where teachers come to the plants for a couple of weeks and get told about everything that’s going on from top to bottom in the plant. They are partners in education where employees participate with their children in schools. The university, of course, has reached out to all levels of education, participated with the industry by having teachers work in the plants, have employees in the plants come to the university and teach, and have students doing research projects. So this infrastructure existed before we ever started this. Next slide please?
In 1999, Dr. Stephen Baxter of Sasol and Joan Valee from McNeese State University called me and said “Do you have a children’s hands-on experiment?” I had been working with the Teachers Institute and had been sort of enthralled with using red cabbage juice as a pH indicator and using Walmart items to do demonstrations of acids and bases in the home. They had a rheology experiment, surface tension, and polymerization. Next slide please?
Okay. We put together the experiments and went into one school. This greatly increased our credibility that we knew what we were doing and what we were planning to do would be possible. We did some troubleshooting and then we began to reach out to our industrial network. We also reached out to the science supervisors in the school board. They were able to define the age group that we ought to be working with, helped us with some of the key messages that we wanted to give in the presentation and supported what the students were learning in school. Next slide?
Okay. From this then we pulled an ad hoc Steering Committee. The key core was the industrial laboratory leadership. I was at the time the Chief Chemist at PPG Industries, having about 43 people working for me. We also included some other middle managers, public relations leaders, and some of the members of the faculty at the McNeese State University. We accumulated 18 members to begin in April of 2000 to build up towards the October National Chemistry Week. Our target place was going to be a university gymnasium. Next slide?
Okay. We did need some funding. With the credibility we had accumulated, we were able to approach the Lake Erie Industrial Alliance, get them involved in what was going on and they provided $10,000 for us to put all of this together. We were going to have to pay for school buses, t-shirts, food, rent, and some other items. Because we were so deeply involved with the industries that were being represented, we were able to also bring some supplies and other things from the industries where we were employed. Each plant was represented on the Steering Committee and there were other satellite industries that were able to support us during this time. I’m looking to the ACS to provide a formula that some dollar amount would be made available for each child involved more than an hour. I’m still looking at that. Let’s go to the next slide.
Volunteers. All of us who were middle managers went back to our industries and said to them, “We need some help” and began to bring employees out of the industries, university faculty, and graduate students who were eagerly involved in this. The Student ACS Chapter members were also involved. Later on in the process, we involved high school seniors and we found out we’d hit a jackpot with that. I’m listing other ACS members as a separate line here, but be aware that in the lines above there are many ACS members who are involved in this activity. Next slide please?
The other very important complimentary group of people here are the teachers. They have a very important role and we try to provide them with support throughout all of this. They’re the ones who schedule our classes and schedule the transportation time to the site. We try to compliment them by giving them t-shirts and bags of goodies they can use in their classroom. We also give them a feedback form, and we’ll discuss that in a little while. Point out that the kids are 90 minutes door-to-door from the time they get to the area until the time they leave to go get back on the buses to return. They’re 12 minutes at each table so they don’t have enough time to get into trouble. We have not had any kind of a disciplinary problem. The teachers are with the kids throughout the process and high school students are there to escort them through so it’s difficult for them to get lost. Next slide?
The impact. I could spend all day telling you the impact. One thing this has been going on for 14 years. We now have the Civic Center. We moved from the university to the Civic Center, and we have that reserved for the next few years. Every fifth grader in Calcasieu Parish knows that next year they’re going to go to ChemExpo. We have reports of teachers referring to the experiments during their classroom studies and teaching. The experiments do not change from year to year. We always use the same experiments. We have finally become aware that this is a closed activity, and for the day we have converted the Civic Center into a school classroom. Guests who have come to observe includes the school board superintendant, mayors of the cities nearby to Lake Charles, state representatives and the managers from the plants who are helping us put all of this on. Next slide?
The other impact is the Steering Committee being from all the plants gets more familiar with one another and familiar with what’s going on in organizations, and the subcommittees in the separate activities get to be closer friends. I put one example here just to give you a scale. We were preparing our red cabbage indicator and needed 1 ounce for each of 3,000 kids. That turns out to be 23 gallons of red cabbage juice that we need. We bring two crawfish boilers, a sack of cabbage, four pizzas, and six beers—having four six packs of beers to get that done. Also, the same interpersonal reactions take place during the volunteer training. Next slide?
Impact on me was I became the Local Section Chair and then Councilor and I’ve participated in drafting the ChemExpo leaders into the local section officer cadre. Early students whom we taught back in year 2000 are now university students and they enjoy coming back and participating in the presentation, as do the high schoolers. Publicity of this event is for the kids to go home and tell their families. This also is significant leadership experience for the Steering Committee and subcommittee chairs. Next slide?
Okay, highlights. Everything that we touch is picked up by Waste Management for disposal. The kids don’t even get to carry the GAC balls with them. Nothing leaves the place that they didn’t bring with them, okay. Gatti’s brings a truck to cook pizza for us during the day to feed the volunteers. We need five 2-way radios to handle the school buses. There are 57 different school bus trips during the day. We do have EMTs, first aid officers, and other medical people on the floor. We have the teachers there and we have other school officials on the floor throughout the entire activity. Next slide?
In conclusion. This is an example of leadership at its best. It’s an example of having a very strong network already in your community and having the leadership to take that network and do something really outstanding with it. I’ve become interested in leadership and I have a slogan of my own: “Become a leader or become a commodity.” Again, my name is Bob Pertuit. I’m giving you my e-mail address, so if you would like any further information, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me. We’ll now move to the next slide and open it up for questions.
Operator: Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have any questions at this time, please press the number one key. Again, if you have any questions at this time, please press the number one key.
At this present time, there’s no one in queue.
Bob Pertuit: Okay.
Martin Rudd: All right. Thank you. We’ll move on to Alexia, our next speaker. So Alexia Finotello is…
Operator: Excuse me. We have one question from Paul from San Diego.
Martin Rudd: Oh please, go ahead, yes.
Paul Bruinsma: I wanted to know if you have trouble recruiting volunteers or things go pretty well with that?
Bob Pertuit: Each one of the activities has a chair for that activity and they have to find their own volunteers. We have gotten a little close. We’ve had some civics groups come forward and ask if they can participate, but we’ve closed the scope up because we’re working with school children don’t have any way to vet these people. We assume with industries that the employees have already been vetted as far as exposing them to children.
Paul Bruinsma: Okay.
Operator: There are no further questions in queue at this time.
Martin Rudd: All right. Our next speaker is Alexia Finotello, Past Chair of the Brazosport Local Section. Brazosport is a medium/small category sized ACS Local Section and they held an industrial networking happy hour in the spring and fall of 2013. This event not only focused on industry involvement but diversity and partnerships as well. Alexia?
Alexia Finotello: Thank you for the introduction. Good afternoon, everybody. As Martin mentioned, I’m the Past Chair for our Brazosport Local Section, and I’ve been active with the section for the past four years. Today I’m going to take a few minutes to tell you about our industrial networking event that we’ve held since 2012 but our big year was in 2013. Next slide please?
So, what is this event about? What our Local Section has done is to hold industrial networking happy hour events. These events take place in the evening, one in the spring, and one in the fall. We started doing these events in 2012 on a smaller scale and have grown since then. Our first 2014 Industrial Networking event will be held later this month. We hold these events at local area restaurants. Over the past few years we have developed relationships with these local restaurants so they know what to expect when our group shows up. The key detail from this event is that it is a collaborative event with other local professional sections in our area. This helps bring our networking event to a larger audience. Next slide please?
So, this slide shows the different groups that came together to plan and host the Industrial Networking Happy Hour. We have our ACS local section, the local AIChE section, the Gulf Coast and Latin American Scientist Organization, as well as NTRO, the new Texas research organization. Those are both Dow Chemical professional networks that participated. We also have the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, NOBCChE, the National Organization for Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers, and ISA, the International Society of Automation. We contacted these local groups and asked if they wanted to co-host the event with us so that we could broadcast our event to a larger audience. Next slide please?
Here’s an example of the flyer that we posted, e-mailed, and circulated about our largest Industrial Networking event. The date was May 22nd, 2013. We’ve been trying to increase our member and non-member attendance at the event, so we thought that free food and beverages would help as well as co-hosting with other organizations to help get our numbers up for events. Next slide please?
So, why did we decide we wanted to do a collaborative happy hour? From polling our members with paper surveys, using Survey Monkey, Facebook and word-of-mouth, we found out that people wanted to do a lot more events including networking. However, people are very busy. They want the benefits of a local section but don’t necessarily have the time to attend each professional organization’s events. So we thought if we did collaborative events we could help people kill a few birds with one stone. So collaboration is really important and we got that from polling our members. Networking is still key. It’s one of the things that people do look forward to, it’s always needed, and it’s an opportunity to work with or talk to people that are outside of your own company. We are also hoping that with free appetizers and beverages we’d get more people to come to our events. Lastly, this is an opportunity to continue to ask our local section members what it is they wanted to get out of their local ACS professional network. Next slide please?
Okay. So how did we make this happen? As I mentioned earlier, we worked on developing good relationships with the local restaurants. That was one of the key things that helped make this event successful because it was easy to find a restaurant that would let us host our event there. We used various methods for advertising, and sent out numerous reminder e-mails. It might have seemed like a lot of advertisement, but not everyone reads every e-mail that they get. I know I sure don’t always get to every e-mail. I thought that word-of-mouth advertising was one of the most powerful ways to advertise our event. We had a sign-in sheet and name tags so that we could know who came to our event as well as who was there at the time. We had interactive activities, mainly networking bingo, where each space on the bingo board had a detail and you had to meet someone at the networking event that fit that description. For example, we had to find someone who is a board member of two professional organizations this year; or find someone who’s run a past marathon, as well as trying to find people that worked at the different companies that would be in attendance for that event. ACS and AIChE had newsletters spread out at the event, and Engineers Without Borders stopped by with a little half-sheet flyer to share what their organization does. One of the key elements of our event, I believe, were the free appetizers as well as the beverage—two beverages, which included beer, wine, margaritas or soda as well. Tickets were handed out to each person that came in when they checked in so we would know how many people had received or not received their beverages. Lastly, we put up table tents with a little QR code. We’ve been trying to increase our presence with social media, mainly on Facebook, so we wanted to make it easy for people to find us by using the QR codes on the table to let people know how to get to our website as well as our Facebook pages. Next slide please?
We came up with this idea from brainstorming within our local board after taking polls of the members and finding out what it is that people wanted and how to get more people to come to our events. After it was established that we were going to do a happy hour, we contacted the other local professional networks to get them on board, explain the purpose, and see if they wanted to buy into the event. In 2012 and 2013 I was the Chair or Vice Chair of ACS and AIChE so I used my friends’ network and persuasive skills to explain to people why it was a good idea to participate in this network with us. Then we set up the event, the logistics of location, advertising and the supplies that we needed to bring and focused on a heavy advertising campaign. We always advertise all of our events with an e-mail blast, but since we are trying very hard to make this a huge event, we spent an extra amount of time on advertising our event. Then on the day of the event we decorated with a little bit of ACS flair by putting up an ACS banner. We also had our newsletters and some ACS mugs that we had made, and the other co-hosting organizations could also bring their professional network swag. AIChE also had mugs that they were giving out for prizes. Then we enjoyed the event and most of this was put together by the ACS and AIChE Board because we have a close relationship but we had representatives from each of the organizations that were active in the planning. Next slide please?
Funding basically determines the size of our events. For the largest networking event that we had, we had the most amount of funding. We asked that each co-hosting organization contribute $100 towards the cost of the event. In 2013, our ACS local section received a national grant for $1,000 for this event and AIChE also received a national grant for $600 for the event, so between the co-hosting commitments from the organizations and the two national grants, that is what funded our 2013 events. The years that we don’t have these large grants, we work with a smaller budget but it’s still doable. Our largest networking event we had 75 people and the total cost was $1,300. Next slide please?
We feel that our industrial networking events have been very successful. We assess the impact of this by taking a look at attendance. In 2012 our two events brought between 20 and 25 people. In 2013, our spring happy hour brought 75 people and our fall happy hour, which was smaller because it had less co-hosting organizations, had about 25 people. So, in all years this is one of our highest attended events. For other events, such as technical seminars and outreach events, we have 15 to 20 people, so it’s great to see such a large number of people coming to these events. We received good feedback from the co-hosting organizations, the attendees, as well as the restaurants that we went to. We had good participation with bingo. Even after we announced the winners of the bingo boards, people were still using their bingo board to go around during the events and try to meet new people. We increased our number of Facebook likes and overall we observed a lot of networking connections being made. Next slide please?
I just wanted to share here some photos from the actual events. We basically took over the right-hand side of this restaurant, so it was packed but everybody seemed to be having a great time. Next slide please?
The key learnings from this event are: help each other out. In our small area, the local professional groups are pulling from the same group of people as members and people can’t do it all, so combining and collaborating on events helps increase attendance and let people get to know members of other groups. Free food also brings people in, especially students, and the free beverages help. Advertise excessively and use many different forms of advertisement media. Lastly, polling members for what they want doesn’t necessarily always work out. We have asked people what they want, they let us know, and then when we plan the event it doesn’t always pan out. However we keep trying to make sure that our local section is doing the best we can to help our members.
With that, that wraps up what I have to say about our event, and I will take any questions. Thank you.
Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, if you have any questions at this time, please press the number one key. Again, if you have any questions at this time, please press the number one key.
Our first question is going to come from Josh from Chicago. Please go ahead.
Josh Kurutz: Hi there. I’m really interested in your advertising. So how do you know which of your advertising methods works? Do you have any tracking mechanisms?
Alexia Finotello: So we’ve been using, for e-mail advertising, we’ve been using MailChimp which lets us know who opens the e-mails, who clicks on the link in the e-mail, and who the e-mail bounced back off of. So that has given us a picture as to like knowing who did receive the e-mail and who did actually open it instead of just deleting it. So that has helped us there. With Facebook, I mean, we are a section of between 200 to 250 and we only have 50 likes on Facebook, so we do use Facebook. I can’t necessarily say that’s the number one method for disseminating information but word of mouth, I would honestly say, is our most successful method. Or just having each Board member try to invite a friend. I think that e-mail and word of mouth are most successful methods of advertisement. Flyers do help but you don’t know how many people will see them.
Josh Kurutz: Can I ask a separate question about what the demographics are like at these networking events? What—like what’s the average age? How many students versus how many professionals, young professionals?
Alexia Finotello: Okay. At this event, because of our geography we don’t actually have many students, we don’t have a university in town, so we only had a couple co-ops. I would say out of the 75 people we had five or six co-ops that would’ve been 21 years old. Then we have a very even distribution of people between 20 and 30, and then people 50 and above. So we have a large experienced network which came from our scientist organization and then a bunch of younger engineers between the ages of 20 and 30 that attended. I think that’s mostly because of where we’re located and who works here but we did get a good mix of experience levels.
Josh Kurutz: Thanks.
Alexia Finotello: You’re welcome.
Operator: And we have another question from Frank Shall (ph) from 518. Please go ahead.
Frank Shaw: Hi.
Alexia Finotello: Hi
Frank Shaw: I’m interested in knowing whether the section is fairly small geographically. I’m in one that’s geographically huge, 90 miles across the base and probably 100 miles from the apex of an isosceles triangle and so we have a lot of trouble getting people together for meetings and activities like this. I was just wondering what size your group is.
Alexia Finotello: Our local section encounters all of Brazoria County which is probably—I know the height of our area is like 60 miles. Because some people live in Houston and everybody else works in Freeport, Texas, I don’t know how wide it is but it is geographically pretty large. The one advantage that we have is most of our members work at Dow Chemical or BASF, which is in Freeport, Texas, so we get people to attend our events right after work because they have to drive past them on their way home. But I do understand what you mean, we do have a lot of people that live in Houston within our section and some of them don’t necessarily want to hang out after work. So what we’ve tried to do is have some events in Houston, which is 50 miles north of our regular base of events, and then the majority of them in Freeport, Texas to try to cater to different audiences based on where they live. Our section is unique because it came into existence because we have a large population of chemists that work at Dow Chemical and BASF so we’re heavily industrial.
Frank Shaw: Okay. Thank you.
Alexia Finotello: You’re welcome.
Operator: There are no more questions in queue at this time.
Martin Rudd: This is Martin Rudd. Alexia, can I ask you a question?
Alexia Finotello: Sure.
Martin Rudd: So you indicated that you received funding of $1,000 from the ACS. Can you explain a little more about that? Was that from an Innovative Project Grant, or IPG?
Alexia Finotello: No, this was not from an IPG, it was a community connections grant. Pardon me for getting confused because I’ve also applied to a lot of AIChE national grants and so I get the names mixed up. But I believe we received an e-mail from ACS National that was sent out to the local section officers and then we applied for it. But at this moment the name of the actual grant escapes me, but I’m assuming we should be able to search on the ACS page and find that name again.
Mikal Ankrah: Hi, Martin. This is Mikal at ACS. I just want to interject for a second. The grant program to which Alexia’s referring is the Corporation Associates Local Section Grant.
Alexia Finotello: That one.
Mikal Ankrah: Yes.
Alexia Finotello: Yes.
Mikal Ankrah: That’s the grant program.
Martin Rudd: All right. Good, thank you. Our next speaker is Elke Schoffers, Past Chair of the Kalamazoo Local Section, which is in the medium-sized category. Elke will talk about an activity that they have sponsored for three years now called “Sustainable Science: Recycle a Poster.” This event involved the section’s membership, both industry and academia, and included graduates and undergraduate students. Elke?
Elke Schoffers: Thank you very much for the introduction, and I welcome all the listeners. On the next slide I’m starting out the presentation with a map. Next slide please?
So the Kalamazoo Local Section has existed since 1942, and there you can see the Michigan geography often referred to the shape of a mitten. When you look in the lower-left section or southwest area, you can see the 61 and the three orange squares there, so you can see that we’re responsible for the elegant Kalamazoo and Van Buren Counties. We have approximately 450 ACS members, and to give people an impression as to what the local atmosphere is, I’ve listed some of the major employees—employers and our members work at these companies. Many listeners may recall that Kalamazoo was the birthplace of the Upjohn Company, which eventually became Pharmacia & Upjohn and then eventually Pfizer. We now have also a spin-off company from Pfizer that’s called Zoetis. There’s also a generic manufacturer of pills, and that’s Perrigo. There are some custom synthesis companies, such as Bridge Organics and Kalexsyn in the local area. We also have Kalsec, Kalamazoo spice extraction company, A. M. Todd and Stryker, just to mention a few.
I also wanted to mention that we have over 25,000 graduate and undergraduate students in the area. The largest university in town is Western Michigan University where I am a chemistry professor. We also have Kalamazoo Valley Community College and Kalamazoo College, which is just next door essentially. For people who are interested in the things we like to do in our Section and to read some of the reports, I recommend they go to . We also have a presence on Facebook.
On the next slide I’m presenting some background information. I need to credit here my colleague and friend and predecessor, Doug Williams, who was the Local Section Chair, and before he took charge of the Local Section in 2010, he initiated conversations with local employers. The economic situation was such that because of mergers and downsizing there was a significant impact on the local chemistry population, so with declining employment, also the participation decreased. The goal was really to get more feedback from local employers and ideas as to how we could engage our membership, and it was very fortunate that Pfizer Animal Health, which is located in downtown Kalamazoo, very much welcomed the conversation and offered us a grant, which subsequently just last year became Zoetis, a spin-off company, also focusing on animal health research.
Now the first event was held at the end of 2011 at a local brewery and then we repeated it two more times in 2012 and 2013. On the next slide, I’m presenting some more information. So essentially what we’re talking about is a poster session with a keynote speaker at the local brewery, and we gave it a title that’s more tongue-in-cheek. We called it “Sustainable Science: Recycle a Poster,” not because everything had to be about sustainable science or chemistry, but we wanted to engage people. Because everybody’s very busy, we thought that if we were to entice people to participate and maybe represent a poster they had already given at an ACS meeting or another local, national or international conference that we would get more people to participate. We also accepted newly prepared posters, so that’s how this title came about. Essentially, it’s mostly chemistry but we’ve pitched a wider tent. We’ve also had biologists and people from the food industry participate, attend and it’s really to network and to mingle and celebrate the rich chemistry that is present in the Kalamazoo Local Section in the Tri-County area.
Even though the grant was given through one industrial grant, we welcomed all members from our local industry. There were many undergraduate and graduate students and, of course, academia from the local colleges and Western Michigan University. We enticed the audience by providing refreshments, complimentary appetizers and we held it in a very popular local brewery, which is called Bell’s Eccentric Cafe. The format essentially has always stayed the same, and for 2013 on the flyer, we have modified attendance such that we made it an open to the public event. Yet we said that two complimentary drink tickets would be given to either current ACS members, poster presenters, and of course Zoetis employees who represent the largest group of industrial chemists at the event.
On the next slide I’m giving you a little bit more background about the venue, which is Bell’s Eccentric Cafe. It’s in a downtown area and they have a very nice back room where one can hold private parties and what one does is sign an agreement and discuss the rental fee and if additional chairs and tables are necessary and then the catering. We always ended up catering from Bell’s although for some facilities it’s sometimes possible to actually have outside catering. We would start to set-up at about 4:00 and had quite a time range so people could come at 5:00 and set up their posters and mingle for about an hour. At 6:00 we would have a speaker and then after the presentation at about 7:00 it would just be mingling and visiting more with posters and connecting with people.
On the next slide I’ve outlined the sponsorship. As I said, it was initiated and first held in 2011 at the time the company was Pfizer Animal Health. Last year, Pfizer Animal Health in downtown Kalamazoo became a spin-off company, Zoetis, which also focuses on animal health. Because the event has been very successful for three consecutive years, we already have a grant to hold it again this year.
On the next slide I’m pointing out what it took to put this event together, some more nuts and bolts. I guess one could say there was a subcommittee. The Chair at the time, Doug Williams, and I on the Local Section side, were interacting with a representative of Pfizer, and that was John Wendt. In 2012 it was just John Wendt and myself, we already knew how to do it and then last year a different representative from now Zoetis, Denis Billen, has joined the group. I’m showing a picture here, these are six chemists from Pfizer and now Zoetis and in the middle is John Wendt and the second person from the right is Denis Billen. We of course distributed flyers. We also had e-mail alerts. We posted the event online on our website. We made notes or distributed the information through Facebook, and we posted the flyers around local colleges. We needed people to set up easels early. Also a little bit of organization we’ve put into the sign-in where people register and receive their drink tickets if they’re eligible, and then of course there’s cleaning up to do after the event.
On the next slide you’ll see some photos. On the upper left is a photo from 2013 and we had a speaker from Kellogg Company telling us about food science. You can also see more a bird’s eye view that shows how the posters were set up and how people were mingling in here. People are very much engaged, they like to enjoy their beer, and so it definitely makes for a much more relaxed atmosphere. Lots of undergraduate students were encouraged to present and took that opportunity to interact with local chemists. In the middle, you can see me, the lower portion and the second on the left, here were some students and colleagues from Kalamazoo College. So students really appreciate the opportunity to practice their communication skills and connect with local chemists. Several of the companies do offer internships, so of course they’re very much interested in knowing how they can best beef up their resume and it’s a great networking opportunity.
On the next slide I’ve outlined some information regarding the keynote speakers. In the first year we had an industrial speaker, Bob Gadwood, who’s shown on the top picture on the left-hand side in the gray suit. He’s the owner of Kalexsyn, which is a custom synthesis company in town. In 2012 we had John Mallett, who focused more on the brewing part and the chemistry of brewing. As you can see in the title “Scientific Influences on the Ancient Art of Brewing and Drinking Beer.” Then last year we had Mayuri Bhakta who told us more about product development at Kellogg’s. Kellogg’s is officially not in our local section but we very much welcomed her as a speaker. You can see her in front of the stage with me answering questions from the audience.
On the following slide I’ve summarized our assessment data. Before this event was started in 2011, the typical attendance for a local section event would be maybe 25 to 45, with the exception of a National Chemistry Week event that was a large scale. Because attendance was on the downturn, we had looked to motivate people and engage them more, so immediately in the first year there was a doubling of attendance of about 80 people and 40-some posters were given. In 2012 it was similar. In 2013 we had the highest numbers and those are the numbers I’m giving you here. As I said, we had taken time to make sure that people sign in to track some of the statistics, and so we had a total of 47 posters, 95 total attendees, 60 of them were ACS members and happy to say there were 28 student presenters. As you can see, there were posters, as I’m listing on the last bullet here. Even somebody from Bell’s Brewery gave us some science. Excell IMS Corp., Kalamazoo College, Kalsec, Perrigo, Western Michigan University, and Zoetis. I’m mentioning here, and in addition Northwestern University and University of Illinois because some of our undergraduate students had done RU programs and then came back with that experience and presented their research.
Then I’m closing on the next slide with some more photos that you can see. It’s a very lovely space at the Bell’s Eccentric Cafe. We have some chairs set out but most people like to just mingle and stand around and listen to the talk while drinking a beer and it’s really a very nice networking opportunity. We’ve encouraged our local chemistry student groups to be involved not just affiliated with ACS but that’s also including NOBCChE. We also have a graduate student association, we had WMU. So we really pitched a large tent and you can see people are having a good time. So it’s always a very popular event and we’re very happy with the outcome of this.
Then, last but not least, on the next slide I would like to give some credit, especially to my colleague and friend Denis Billen who is a chemist during the day and a photographer and DJ at night and who took many of the pictures. Of course, we’re very much indebted to the funding by Pfizer which has now become Zoetis. If you want to get in touch with our local section, we do have a website presence at , and we’re also on Facebook. With that, I’m leaving it to the next slide, and I’m ready to answer any questions.
Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, if you have any questions at this time, please press the number one key. Again, if you have any questions at this time, please press the number one key.
Our first question is going to come from Paul from San Diego. Please go ahead.
Paul Bruinsma: Hi, Elke. How do you handle the poster submissions? Do people have to submit a title/abstract ahead of time, get accepted, or what?
Elke Schoffers: Yes, that’s a good question. Essentially we let everybody participate and all we asked for was a title and the authors, especially the presenting author, and then we printed out a list of all the posters. We tried to attach numbers. We definitely would set out a list of all the posters. Because there are less than 50 posters, it was very easy to find it. When it comes to abstracts we didn’t really make it that complicated. We like seeing industrial participation but very often there are patent and related issues there, so they don’t want to give away important information and they often—always need some approval.
Paul Bruinsma: Right.
Elke Schoffers: So that’s also why we had said recycle a poster, so if you’re working at a company and you already presented at ACS then why not just put it up in town again because people may not have seen it or have gone to that particular meeting.
Paul Bruinsma: Then would the titles and abstracts be e-mailed out ahead of the meeting?
Elke Schoffers: They would be—yes. They would be e-mailed to the contact person, so they would e-mail it to me and then I would work with the industry contact, he would collect some too, and then we would print out a big poster as well.
Paul Bruinsma: Okay.
Operator: Our next question is going to come from Randy. He’s from the Princeton Local Section.
Randy Weintraub: Hi. I enjoyed your presentation. I’m wondering about the nice student turnout and participation. Do you credit that with the encouragement of many of the faculty?
Elke Schoffers: Thank you. Yes, essentially as long as I’ve been involved with KCS I’ve made a strong point that this is a good opportunity for students to interact with others and if you can entice them—they may not be members of ACS but if you say “Well, but if you volunteer with setting up with the posters or you’re presenting, you would get a drink ticket or.” So that was—it was very easy to get students excited about it. They know it’s a very fun event to attend and we’ve had some very interesting speakers. Even though we live mostly in the Kalamazoo area, we don’t see each other that often, so they really like the opportunity. But we make sure that it’s well publicized through e-mails, to our memberships and to all the student groups and just being very persistent and saying “Remember that’s when the presentations are or events are, and you can give a poster, you can practice for an upcoming meeting or again present something that you had previously shown at a meeting.”
Randy Weintraub: Thank you.
Operator: We have a question from Josh from Chicago. Please go ahead.
Josh Kurutz: I was wondering how you went about contacting the industry partners for funding? Like, who do you find? Did you have a previous relationship with them?
Elke Schoffers: At the time it was Doug Williams, the former chair. We have a membership list, of course there’s contact information there and, you know, if you have lived in this town chances are you know somebody at Kalsec or at Kalexsyn or Bridge Organics or you have run into somebody. So Doug was very effective in communicating with people. The funny thing is that I actually know John Wendt who was the initial contact because we both went to graduate school. So it’s a small community.
Elke Schoffers: But essentially the membership list and just knowing other people in the area or at least one person and then you ask “Well who do you know? Who do we contact? Who could help us out here or get—give us some feedback?”
Josh Kurutz: Okay, so this is entirely through like personal contact and not through any kind of official channels for outreach?
Elke Schoffers: No. Yes, no, no, no, it’s personal contact and our membership list, yes.
Josh Kurutz: Okay. Thanks.
Elke Schoffers: You’re welcome.
Operator: Elke, there are no question—no more questions in queue at this time.
Elke Schoffers: Okay.
Martin Rudd: Okay. Thank you, Elke. I’d just like to finish up if there are no additional questions to say that a complete transcript of today’s webinar will be posted to the ACS website within 10 days and we’ll send you a message when it’s available. Again, I want to thank you for joining us and look forward to hearing about your activities from your local section. Hopefully you’ve heard something that is relatable to your local section, certainly something inspirational. Remember that as you develop your activities and hold your activities, you can enter them into FORMS at any time as part of next year’s 2014 Annual Report, which will be due in February 2015. So if there are no further questions, thank you very much and enjoy the rest of your afternoon.
Operator: Thank you ladies and gentlemen for joining. This completes your webinar. You may all disconnect and have a great day.
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