John Flynn, AIA
Communications Committee Chair
Hello, Colleagues –
I’m writing this week to give you all an update on AIA Oregon Communications. As always, the Communications Committee endeavors to provide our members with the most useful, helpful, and meaningful content through all our platforms. We continue to improve our communications strategies and methods – and that has never been more important than in the past year.
Let me pause to acknowledge that the heavy lifting for the Communications Committee is done by the great staff at AIA Oregon. So, a big thank you to Kathy, Adrienne, Colleen, and Curt for all your hard work! Keep in mind that since last year’s pandemic-induced shutdown, almost all AIA programs, meetings, and special events have been conducted virtually. I think that, in a way, this has promoted our goal of building a strong and united architecture community statewide.
As an integral component of AIAO’s member services, our communications content and platforms have continued to deliver on the pressing issues of the day – be it navigating the pandemic landscape, addressing the struggle for Social Justice, or responding to climate change/natural disasters. In addition to the Covid-19 resources available on our website, we have published our Social Justice Action Plan and important related resources. As well, recent Thursdays @ Three messages and today’s Thursday Roundtable address preparedness and recovery as our state navigates natural disasters such as wildfires and power outages. I encourage you to visit our Resources page for many links to useful information on these topics and more.
For the Communications Committee, one carry-over “to do” item from 2020 is the development and launch of the “Find an Architect” page of our website. During this first quarter of 2021, we have restarted our work on this outreach component. Note that the AIA Oregon Profile Directory, available through our website, continues to serve in its capacity as a link to member firms. However, a new searchable database, with categorized filters, that includes member firms from throughout the state has been a goal since we transitioned to a single statewide Chapter. Two weeks ago, our weekly Thursday Roundtable hosted a discussion on how best to formulate this search tool. We know that all member firms will be represented – it’s the categorizations and filters that need to be fine-tuned.
Our main goal as we develop our search tool is, obviously, to promote member architects and firms. But we are committed to doing this in a fair and inclusive way. For reference, we have been looking at some of our peer organizations (AIA Austin, AIA Colorado) to gauge the effectiveness of how their search pages are organized. We want to look carefully at the typical filter categories – firm size, geographic location, project types – to yield effective short lists of firms. We are challenging ourselves to find means of organizing search results (for example, non-alphabetical listings) so that all firms get a fair chance at showing up at the top of a search listing. And we’re sensitive to the fact that each member firm offers a unique set of attributes to potential clients; so perhaps there’s a “spotlight” filter that allows users to find firms that are differentiated by characteristics such as minority-/women-ownership, design-build capacity, or experience with non-profits.
That's a tall set of tasks but we’re confident that all firms will be equitably and fairly represented. As we sort through our decisions, we have engaged a web development specialty consultant who will provide the coding and plug-ins that will make the page functional. It’s going to be a great feature on the website! Stay tuned to Thursdays @ Three for notification that “Find an Architect” has gone live.
Thanks and best wishes to everyone!