Economic forecast: tech organization rethinks how it engages members

Company: In 2020, Tampa Bay Tech, like many other industry associations, had to drastically rethink the way it presents its member programming. The idea that tech-sector workers are merely keyboard warriors, communicating via screens and webcams, couldn't be further from the truth, says Jill St. Thomas, executive director of Tampa Bay Tech. The nonprofit technology council — one of the nation's oldest and largest technology groups — was founded in 2000 and boasts more than 100 member companies. “The tech community relies heavily on meetups to engage with peers and connect with thought leadership,” she says. Leveraging its own network and the website Meetup.com, Tampa Bay Tech hosts, facilitates and promotes dozens of events each year, many of them in person. That all changed, of course, because of the COVID-19 crisis. “We had to shift our mindset,” St. Thomas says. “When you're in the space of putting on events, one of your key metrics is always how many people came, and so we had [to develop] this new kind of quantity metric. We’ve learned this year that some of our most successful events were smaller peer gatherings, like a [virtual] roundtable meeting of our CEO council with maybe a dozen members.” A consistently high level of engagement paid off for Tampa Bay Tech, St. Thomas says, as the organization added 23 new members and annual partners this year.