On Tuesday, September 10, a lively chat was held regarding the relationship between SHRM professional chapters and volunteers, and student programs.  Nearly 129,000 impressions were made, and nearly 36,000 accounts were reached according to Tweetreach.com.

Here are the questions and answers that took place:

Q1 - What are the benefits of working with a SHRM student chapter? 

The participants found a number of reasons to engage with student chapters:

• Students were going to be their future peers; the professional chapter's future depended on them
• Student chapters provide quality access to interns, as well as served as a source to fill future vacancies
• To break down generational barriers
• To fill a programming niche at the professional chapter, as students choose and present a topic of interest to professionals

Q2 - What are you, your professional chapter or State Council doing to support your SHRM student chapter?

• Providing free professional chapter membership to students
• Mentoring
• Providing for discounted, or free, registration at chapter meetings, or the state conference
• Providing speakers
• Job shadowing opportunities
• Offering the opportunity to tour a company's plant or workplace
• Financial support - $500 if the chapter earns a Superior Merit Award, $250 if they earn a merit award
• State Council offers $100 to each student chapter that submits a merit award

Q3 - What are the biggest challenges you face in working with a SHRM student chapter?

• The schedule often made planning difficult with the academic calendar running from August-May, which the professional chapter goes from January to December.
• Student turnover made building relationships difficult
• Students often lacking the time to connect or showing interest in the professional chapter 

Q4 - What could SHRM be doing to help address those challenges?

• Make working with student chapters a bigger part of SHAPE
• Address current chapter bylaws to create a student member category
• Examine new ways for chapters to communicate with students
• Be clearer with professional chapters about the challenges inherent in working with student chapters

Q5 - Based on tonight’s discussion, what is one thing you will do to help your student chapter this year? 

• Create a Student Core Leadership Area representative for the chapter
• Create a membership category for students
• Be more aggressive in connecting with the student chapter(s) in the area
• Expand opportunities for students at the state level
• Encourage greater volunteering among professionals with the student chapter
• Utilize Tara Fournier, SHRM's Manager of Member Engagement, as a resource 

Per usual, SHRMChats will take place at 8PM EDT, 7 PM CDT, 6 PM MDT and 5 PM PDT on the second Tuesday of the month.  Look for the next SHRMChat to be held October 10, where the focus will be on SHRM Chapter Membership issues.

On Tuesday, the monthly #SHRMChat focused on the vexing topic of chapter programming - where do you find your speakers?  The lack of collaboration among chapters sharing information about successful speakers was noted as well as a desire for a Yelp-like tool where chapters could identify good (and not-so-good) speakers.  Hearing about this, the St. Norbert College SHRM chapter sprung into action and put together a tool using list.ly for chapters to utilize in addressing the programming issue.  Sharing the details is guest blogger, Jenna Ray Hines, President of SNC SHRM: 

Have you ever had a difficult time finding a quality speaker in your region for your SHRM Chapter or Conference event? 

We have created Crowdsourcing SHRM Chapter Speakers for that exact reason. 

We wanted to create an outlet for chapters to find and recommend quality, cost efficient speakers within their respective regions. After a chapter has a quality speaker, they can post on their list.ly regional page to promote the speaker and presentation topic as well as mention if it was HRCI-approved. 

This social media tool will be useful for chapters to collect ideas, collaborate, and share successes. 

We are using list.ly, a social media website that allows users to create and share lists that other users can build upon, to host our five regional lists. Each one of the regional pages represents one of the five SHRM HR regions and can be used by them to collect their list of recommended regional speakers:

As you can see, not only are details such as speaker name, date he or she spoke, HRCI-credits, SHRM event, who recommended the speaker, and details about his or her talk included, you can give thumbs up or down to a particular speaker.

To learn more about Crowdsourcing SHRM Chapter Speakers go to your regional page below:

Southwest Region
Southeast Region
North Central Region
Northeast Region
Pacific West Region

Of course, this tool is only as good as the people who contribute to it.  Be sure to add a speaker who you felt excelled, and share the list with chapter leaders in your region.

Thanks to Jenna for the post.  If you have questions, do not hesitate to contact Jenna (@jennaray21) or me....and, note, Jenna will be graduating in May of 2013 and looking for a job in HR.

As I was perusing consumerist.com, I came across this story regarding Chili's Restaurant and the use of FourSquare. For those too lazy to click on the link, Chili's will offer customers who check into FourSquare at one of their restaurants a special coupon for free chips and salsa. It is apparent that both Foursquare and Chili's find this beneficial: Foursquare will get more customers to use their service and Chili's will attract more customers to their store in the hopes of receiving an additional goodie.

Next month, I will be presenting at the 2010 WI SHRM State Leadership Conference on the topic of "Integrating Social Media to Attract & Retain Members." The Chili's example made me curious as to whether SHRM professional chapters could potentially use FourSquare as one such tool for membership management (as an aside, I have yetto sign up for FourSquare). For example, like Chili's, could you offer those individuals who check into a chapter meeting on FourSquare a special prize (i.e., one person could have their registration fee waived for that particular meeting).

Further, a chapter could use Foursquare as a mechanism to raise money for the SHRM Foundation. As Kyle Lacy suggests,

Users will gain points when they accomplish certain activities like checking in, making multiple stops in a day, adding a new venue, making a repeat visit, or consecutively checking into a certain location. Encourage users to rack up the points and put a value to the points they are accruing (Ex: $0.04 per point). At the end of the promotion donate the amount of money to a charity. This encourages visits to your business and gives back to those who need our help!

Does anyone know if their SHRM professional chapter uses FourSquare? If so, how? Can it be used to make your chapter meeting THE place to be for the month?