From the President, November 2001
Preaching to the Choir

Our chapter does a lot of things very well. The committees have enough inertia that the entire Board of Directors could take the rest of the year off. Well, maybe just the president.

Our Education Committee and Certification Committee have a long history of outstanding work. Each year they produce successful educational programs based on CSI's Manual of Practice and common construction documents. A measure of their success is the examination passing rate of those who take part in the programs, which has regularly been among the highest in CSI.

The Programs Committee has improved the content and variety of our chapter meetings, and recent experiments with meeting time and location have resulted in participation by members who could not attend the traditional Monday night meetings.

The Awards Committee has been quite successful, winning recognition for chapter work at the Region and Institute levels. At the same time, the quality of the chapter awards has increased. All contributions should be recognized, especially in a volunteer organization. We formally acknowledge individual efforts, but make relatively few formal awards, as giving awards for everything diminishes their value.

Because our newsletter has been produced under contract, the Communications Committee could easily sit back and wait for it to appear each month. Yet this committee has expanded its work in the last few years, and taken a more active part in production of the newsletter. The result has been an increase in the quality and technical content of the newsletter, introduction of the Desktop Reference, and an even more useful chapter roster. Just as important, chapter publications now regularly appear on time.

With the largest membership in CSI, it's apparent that the Membership Committee has done a great job of promoting the value of membership. I recall the battle for the "largest chapter" many years ago; I am also aware of the work required to maintain that level. The addition of our Student Affiliate at Dunwoody pushed our membership to six hundred, but that did not bring an end to recruitment. We are now working on plans to make CSI available to even more students.

the other side of the coin

Now that we're all busy patting ourselves on the back, let's take another look at what we - CSI and, more important, our chapter - are doing to increase the value of participation in CSI.

I just spent several minutes talking about how great we are. But who was I talking to? The vast majority of those who read this column are already CSI members, most of them are members of our chapter. How does it serve us when we talk about what we do only to ourselves? Yes, we do need to know what our chapter is doing, and we should congratulate ourselves for our successes. But we must go beyond preaching to the choir.

Just about any description of CSI includes something like "CSI's members include architects, engineers, specifiers, contractors, building owners, facility managers, and product manufacturers…" or words to that effect. But who are we? Who really belongs to CSI?

According to statistics I recently received from Institute, about seventy-five percent of our 18,000 members are product suppliers and design professionals. (Those who entered their profession as specifier - about 950 - make up just five percent of the total membership.) Relatively few of our members are owners, facility managers, contractors, or others involved in construction.

It is time to go beyond our established member base and increase participation by the other groups we claim as members. This will not be an easy task; it is hard to imagine how some people in construction would fit in - or why they would want to join. We must find out what those non-members that we claim to represent want or need, and then find ways to address those needs. It is not enough to say, "Construction documents are the most important thing, and we will make believers of them."

There are a lot of people who don't belong to CSI, and we do not have the resources to go after all of them at once. One of my goals this year is to quit preaching to our choir and take our message outside of the chapter. Our first target will be a group that is already intimately involved in producing contract documents - the engineers.

There are significant differences in the ways that architects and engineers produce specifications. In general: larger architectural firms have dedicated specifiers, while engineers rarely do; engineers write their own specifications, while architects seem to avoid them; architects are more familiar with the way specifications are supposed to be written and organized according to the Manual of Practice and MasterFormat; engineers are more familiar with the products they specify.

We have already taken first steps to improve communications with engineers, to learn more about how they work, to help them understand how construction documents are organized, and to find ways to better coordinate our documents. As president of the chapter, I have made formal contact with the presidents of professional engineer organizations. I am also forming an ad hoc committee to begin work on standardization of a few common specification sections. If you have suggestions regarding this initiative, or if you want to be involved in review of the documents, please let me know.

Sheldon Wolfe, President
Minneapolis-St. Paul Chapter, CSI
swolfe@bwbr.com