NCBFAA Communications Report

Board of Directors Meeting, January 21, 2017

NCBFAA Annual Conference App

  • Those attending this year’s Annual Conference will have available to them a mobile app. Although the NEI has used mobile apps in their Conferences, this will be a first for the NCBFAA. To familiarize Annual Conference goers with the app’s functionality, we will conduct a webinar free of charge a few weeks out from the Annual Conference to discuss how to download it and how it works.
  • By negotiating with E & M Consulting, publishers of our Membership Directory, we were able to leverage that product’s revenue stream with the costs of producing the Mobile app. As a result, we secured a really good price for this app as well as one for the NEI G-TEC and the NCBFAA 2017 GAC.
  • The app will open with a splash page, then lead to a log in screen. Once logged in, the user will see a ‘home’ page with 12 buttons. A side menu will allow user to see full list of menu items.
  • The app will have the ability to add and view content for four different types of conference goers – Sponsors, Exhibitors, Speakers and Attendees. Each type will have a main alphabetical list of entries, with the ability to click on a specific entry for more detailed information. All four types will have the ability to allow app users to ‘follow’ these entries, adding them to a list within the Attendee profile for quick reference. Users can also make additions/changes to their app profile easily.
  • The app will also have the ability to add and view content for the Agenda/Schedule. Entries on this list have the ability to click on an entry for more detailed information (including showing the speaker and users who have added the item to their attendance list). From the entry, users can also click to view the speakers’ detail card. The entry also shows its own mini-feed of posts specifically tagged with this entry.
  • For an added level of connectivity, the app allows for posts, photo posts and surveys the users can participate with. There is a central Activity feed that allows users to see what’s going on during the conference. Users can add to this feed directly or through other parts of the app. Many Activity items tie in with the Leaderboard of the app – users can gain points by completing certain tasks and reaching milestones, adding direct communication/participation with users.
  • The app supports surveys, both for specific sessions, as well as a general conference survey. Completion of the surveys will give NCBFAA feedback about the engagement of the conference material and also serve as a way for users to add to their own points.
  • The app supports an overview map for the event location, allowing users to quickly see where they need to be. The map will allow for user to pinch-zoom for closer details.
  • The app will have a section that directly ties to the NCBFAA Social Media Sites. The app will also have a Resources section. This section of the app will support a blog that will replace the “Daily Voice” Annual Conference newsletter and files section (i.e. session handouts) to be available to the user.

2017 NCBFAA Scholarship Program

•The deadline for submitting entries for the 2017 NCBFAA Scholarship Program has passed and the Scholarship Committee is busy poring over the submissions to pick this year’s winner. Once again, long-time supporter and NCBFAA Affiliate Member, Roanoke Trade, a division of Roanoke Insurance Group Inc. will be sponsoring the NCBFAA’s annual $5,000 scholarship for a high school senior or an undergraduate student at an accredited college or university. The topic for this year’s essay will be “Will the Trans Pacific Partnership benefit or harm American workers and American businesses?” This was the 24th year that the NCBFAA has promoted this scholarship competition as a way to further education in our industry. By helping students defray the cost of learning about the customs broker and forwarder businesses, the NCBFAA scholarship program contributes to the increasing professionalism of our industry and encourages those seeking a career in international trade and commerce.

•To qualify for the award, student applicants must submit a 1,000 – 2,000 word essay on the chosen topic to be judged by a panel of experts. An eligible applicant must be an employee, or child of an employee, of a Regular NCBFAA member, but may not own a company involved in the industry. The candidate must also be pursuing a career or curriculum in customs brokerage, freight forwarding or a related field, such as international trade.

•In addition to the essay, the applicant’s submission must include the following:

•Employment verification letter from an NCBFAA regular member firm indicating that the candidate or candidate’s parent is so employed.

•Proof of acceptance to or current enrollment in an accredited college or university, your class year (e.g., HS senior, undergraduate freshman, sophomore etc.), and major area of study.

•Short (100 words or less) personal statement on your career goals.

•The scholarship winner is expected to join us at the NCBFAA Annual Conference being held at the Hilton New Orleans riverside, New Orleans, LA, April 2-5, 2017, and will join the other Conference attendees on the morning of April 3 to receive the Award, which is paid directly to the student’s College or University.

NCBFAA 2017 Membership Directory

  • The decision was made NOT to distribute the new Directory at the Annual Conference. Instead, copies will be mailed to the primary contacts of each member firm and to those Annual Conference attendees who are not the primary contacts.
  • We are currently supplying editorial content to the 2017 NCBFAA Membership Directory publisher. Included in the book are listings with contact information for all NCBFAA members (Regular, Regular Member Branch Offices, Associate, Affiliate and Affiliated Associations) as well as the Board of Directors and Principal Standing Committees. A special section of the publication, devoted to our Affiliated Association members, provides them with the opportunity to introduce themselves to the reader and describe the various programs and activities they undertake on behalf of their industry members. Along with detailed information on the NCBFAA, the book also contains reprints of the NCBFAA By-Laws, recommended Terms and Conditions and the Combined Bill of Lading.
  • Again this year, we have determined to continue our Directory production arrangement with E&M Consulting, Inc., for the 2017 Directory. To assist them in their ad solicitation we emailed the 1,000+ primary contacts for our member firms that we maintain in our database requesting their participation in our Directory. If you hear from E&M Consulting, Inc., or someone in your office asks about them, please consider placing an ad in the Directory.Although the time for updating entries has passed, those who wish to may still purchase advertising space in our Directory.

Annual Report

  • For those of you who have been asked to submit information, the deadline forcontributions to the 2016 NCBFAA Annual Report is February 9. We really need to adhere to that date since this year’s edition is planned to be somewhat more elaborate than those in previous year.
  • Each of the Committee Chairs and Officers have been notified twice of our need for their reports by the deadline and in a couple of weeks they will receive the third and final notice encouraging them to summarize their activities on behalf of the Association and its membership over the past year. The 2016 Annual Report will be published as a four-color, large format, magazine style report with pictures, pull out quotes, and graphics that would be professionally designed and could serve not only as an informational product for members and others but also as a marketing tool for membership expansion and retention. In addition, advertising opportunities will be offered as part of the publication.
  • Annual Conference attendees from Regular Member firms who attend the Annual Meeting or simply request one will receive a copy of the Annual Report that will include financials. In addition, each Directory mailed to a Regular Member primary contact will include a copy of the complete Annual Report. Copies without the financials will be used as marketing vehicles.
  • As in previous years, I am confident that the most recognizable topics like customs, carriers and cargo security will be fully covered but there are a number of lesser-known projects that, while under the radar, are just as vital to day-to-day operations and worthy of recognition. The 2016 NCBFAA Annual Report is the perfect platform for that recognition.
  • Submitters need not write the whole article; just highlight in bullets the important points. We can flesh out the copy and we will run whatever we draft by the submitter before it gets published. On the other hand, they are welcome to draft a topic sentence by identifying the "who, what, why, when and where" of the subject. Create five of those and your submission will be five paragraphs long; 10 and it will be 10 paragraphs. Again any edits will be sent to you for final approval. Those who don't want to write at all are invited call the NCBFAA office and speak with me; I'll take notes, draft an article and send it out for final approval.

Affiliate Member MarketPlace Proposal

  • During every Annual Conference, the NCBFAA conducts an Exhibitor MarketPlace for vendors to share their latest programs, products, and services with our Conference attendees. It is usually well–received and all involved report successful outcomes.
  • However, that is only two days out of the whole year. What if we could create a year round Exhibitor MarketPlace for all of our Affiliate Members? A place where not only could they display and explain their programs, products, and services but they could also actually sell them to our members.
  • We could do this with an e-commerce-based MarketPlace residing on the NCBFAA Website. The price of inclusion would be deep discounts for NCBFAA members purchasing from these vendor participants.Ideally, the site would be compartmentalized so that each participating vendor could exercise full control over their portion of the site in order to update prices and products and possibly control layout within a predetermined range.
  • Should the cost of establishing such an arrangement be prohibitive, we could implement a portal site that regular members using their standard credentials could access that would teak e them to the vendors’ site. Their sites in turn would recognize the member as an eligible participant based on the method they used to navigate to the site.

Social Media Campaign

  • Given the recent experience with the national election, there can be little doubt about the effectiveness of a focused and concentrated social media campaign to get issues, personalities, and events front and center. Recognizing the value of such a tool, the NCBFAA is undertaking an effort to increase its presence on social media.
  • In order to drive member engagement with the Association, we are planning to conduct an ongoing social media campaign centered on two channels, Facebook and Twitter.
  • The Facebook leg of the process will involve no less than two or more than five postings each business day. These postings will take the form of original content such as questions, photos, videos, quotes or calls to action as well as posting articles to share. The goal of this outreach is to develop a loyal and active follower base that can carry our message to their cyber followers, thus acting as a force multiplier in sharing our message.
  • Our twitter efforts will be geared to mobilizing support for industry positions, political stances, awareness campaigns, leadership appearances, technology applications, and other relevant developments that affect the transportation
  • In planning this addition to our communication efforts, a number of considerations came into play.
  • One how does this fit with our institution and our membership? Is there interest among our members for such instant communication or would they be off put by a continual flow of comments and observations? While it is pretty easy to establish a social media presence within the various channels available to us, we will needed some new updated market research as part of this effort to determine what level of interest there is for an NCBFAA social media presence since the question was asked approximately 24 months ago. Our experience with the GAC indicated that there is indeed interest in this communication channel among our constituencies.
  • Two, confirm that we are committed to the time needed to stay on top of such a campaign as an added value benefit to our members. Failure to keep the flow of information not only timely but also useful will quickly lead to a drop in followers, which in turn obviates the whole purpose of using social media. Although the capital cost of such a venture is virtually nil, the labor cost could be significant given the need to have an employee continuously monitoring and feeding information into the various social media channels, assuming we are serious about keeping it current.
  • Three, although we have dabble in this area before, we will now be undertaking it seriously. It should be pointed that demonstrated results may not become apparent overnight. A number of other associations and our members have opened social media channels with varying degrees of success and, those that have, understand the difficulty of building a substantial following when starting from scratch and relative obscurity. So we have to give serious thought to how much time and effort we want to dedicate to this exercise. We will have to define a project plan with milestones and metrics that can help us measure, however subjectively, the relative success or failure of our endeavor.

Press Relations

  • The NCBFAA is continuing to publish the “International Trade Today’s ACE Weekly News Brief,” (compiled specifically for the NCBFAA), every Wednesday on the public side of our Website to insure the widest possible distribution. Prepared by the professional staff of International Trade Today, this publication replaced the discontinued Daily ACE Summaries, which Regular Members may still view on our Website. Focused on the ongoing rollout of ACE, this new publication, backed by the considerable editorial resources of International Trade Today and its experienced cadre of newsgatherers, provides accurate, substantial, useful, and timely information on this crucial topic every week. With this product in their toolkit, members should be better able to navigate the complexities and challenges of our increasingly automated commercial environment.
  • NCBFAA uses Constant Contact extensively to drive its communications strategy by sending out a variety of marketing materials. Since the last Board meeting the NCBFAA has distributed 52 communications to a variety of audiences using this method. The types of communications include GAC Blasts, AC Blasts, ACE Updates, Monday Morning eBriefing, CBP Important Notices, Conference Evaluations, Board of Directors Updates, NCBFAA Committees, Pertinent Government Regulations, NCBFAA General Information, Membership Renewal Offers, BIS Updates, NCBFAA Presidential Letters to Members, among others.
  • By releasing this information to our members, it strengthens our awareness and respectability through offering timely, strategic, and relevant communications. It also bolsters our membership retention rate because it provides current members with a tangible benefit that can be analyzed and utilized for their company’s advancement. Also, providing such a diverse range of communications topics reinforces NCBFAA’s brand of “Voice of the Industry” and allows an interactive avenue to directly communicate with the members and discover how our Association can best serve the membership.
  • The bulk email mechanism we use is Constant Contact and it provides a function that permits recipients to unsubscribe. To date, it has been an all or none proposition though of late we have send out emails with the option to contact us if they no longer wished to receive the instant email but still wanted to remain on the mailing list for other messages. Unfortunately, this process entails additional work on our part in order to record and maintain.
  • We have since learned that we can provide our users with a way to opt out of some but not all of our emailings automatically. Each message includes, in addition to the unsubscribe opt-out, a link that enables recipients to update their profile. The options available up to now were “Unsubscribe me from ALL mailings” or “I wish to continue receiving occasional mailings based on my interests”; however, there were no choices under the latter option but now there are:
  • 2017 Annual Conference
  • 2016 Government Affairs Conference
  • Monday Morning eBriefing
  • NCBFAA General Announcements
  • Automated Commercial Environment
  • Press Coordination/Promotion is being used to generate more publicity for our Annual Conference. We will be contacting publishers and editors at freight forwarding and transportation publications to request our Conference event be added to their calendar as well as promoted in their publication.This has proven quite effective in getting our information included at their Websites for previous events.
  • We continue to stress the established press release policy as part of an overall strategy to generate coverage and educate our constituencies, with a regular schedule of announcements. Examples would be one after each Board meeting and/or major committee meeting, Special events or Recognition Awards, etc., describing the outcome of deliberations, hearings, and gathering, as appropriate. Doing this would accomplish numerous things.
  • One, of course, is to get our message out to the public - which includes the regulatory agencies that govern our trade and potential members.
  • Two, would be to get our names in the editorial offices with regularity which means more journalists would become familiar with us even if they don't run our information, and thus rely on our organization as the voice of the industry.
  • Three, provide immediate talking points for our members and other Association representatives.
  • The press, especially our trade press, is acutely interested in our activities and is anxious to cover us extensively. It would benefit us greatly to interact more with them through regular press releases and press events. Although the Journal of Commerce and American Shipper magazines have both agreed to run regularly scheduled articles written by leadership, we have not taken advantage of these venues.
  • Perhaps if we established an agreed to list of topics that we could cover and get commitments from the subject matter experts to provide some talking points or bulleted items germane to these issues we would have the necessary resources in place to take advantage of this publicity opportunity.
  • To date, we continue initiating portions of this proposal via the Monday Morning eBriefing, increased Press Releases and new applications for reciprocal membership with other organizations.

NCBFAA Website General Information

  • The Website requires anyone wishing to navigate pass the public sites or to register for events to create an account along with a username and password. Users may then enter the site during subsequent visits. As of September 8, 2016, 18,098(7,937 member affiliated and 10,161 non-member)individuals representing 7,208(1,092member and 6,116non-member)organizations have secured usernames and passwords.
  • The NCBFAA Web site is an excellent means of communicating with our constituencies and distributing important information about the NCBFAA and its work. However, we can do more. We have been negligent in posting Committee minutes and actions. The solution is to establish an effective protocol for quickly turning around vetted copy of these minutes for posting. The Board could decide whether external counsel should do such vetting, Committee Chair, Executive Committee or a Board Sub-Committee established solely for this purpose. Once we get the approved copy in Headquarters, it is a very simple matter to post it and announce its availability to regular members in the MMeB. If all the Committees that meet in person, by telephone, or teleconference did this it would:
  • Facilitate production of the Annual Report immensely.
  • Provide us with material to use for press releases.
  • Identify NCBFAA activity on behalf of members we could use to market to prospective members.

However, it is important that some authority ensures the posted material does not contain anything sensitive or premature that might reflect badly on any group we may be involved with or on us. This requires, on the reviewer’s part, not only political sensitivity but also a thorough understanding of what the reporting group is doing. This makes it very difficult to set up a system for speedily clearing this material so we can post it while it still has relevancy. Perhaps the executive Committee or the Board has some thoughts on how we can do this without offending the originating authors.