A Look at Our Journey in 2020

Page Up bylaws call for an Annual Meeting to elect new Operating Committee members. Traditionally, we have also taken advantage of this opportunity to review the state of the organization. Below are key takeaways of this year’s virtual Annual Business Meeting. You can also view the full presentation here.  

A Look at Our Journey in 2020

Marjorie Benzkofer
Chair, Page Up

Community

• Page Up has continued to grow. We’re now at 262 members across 16 countries. The diversity in our membership – geographic, racial, industry, thought – is bringing rich perspectives and experiences to our community.
  
• Despite everyone having a uniquely busy year, this community chose to spend more time together to connect with peers and learn in real-time. We needed our community more than ever this year. 
• Engagement increased by 8% since last year, showing the importance and value of that connection. We launched the Diversity Action Alliance where together we have pledged improvement against specific DE&I goals and to share even more information so we can truly benchmark progress as an industry.

 

Peer Networking

• We launched the Page Up Connect Facebook group that already 171 of our members have joined to post questions, brainstorm issues and share new ideas.
• In August we launched a Member Match program – a kind of concierge service where you can ask to be matched with a specific Page or Page Up member to have more in-depth, ongoing conversations around a topic of your choice.

Conversations

• More than 100 events were organized to facilitate dialogues around emerging topics and issues. 
• We hosted Page Conversations, smaller and more intimate Think Thursday calls and Mentoring Circles, where members found it comfortable to raise tough questions and get ideas and inspiration from peers.
• Our two fully virtual global conferences, the Page Spring Seminar as well as this Annual Conference had record attendance of Page Up members.

Learning

• We created timely repositories on both the pandemic as well as racial equity and inclusion to share best practices, frameworks of programs, messages and thought leadership.
• Spring Seminar focused on CommTech and the appetite for those learnings was so strong that we developed a quickstart guide, a case study and hosted a number of webinars to continue teaching ourselves while also sharing the lessons with our teams.
• We conducted research and shared the findings around how the communications profession increasingly finds itself at the center of decision-making as corporate leaders tackle the realities of running a business in an era of historic transformation. 
• We have also begun sharing actionable key takeaways from our Think Thursday calls with our entire community so that we can all learn from each other even if we weren’t able to make it to the calls.

Nominating Committee Report
Tom Martin
Chair, Page Up Nominating Committee

Tom gave an overview of the Operating Committee and highlighted what the Nominating Committee looks for in these individuals. He then presented the new Operating Committee members up for confirmation and called for a virtual vote in which all nominees were approved. These include:

• Sarah Campbell Donia, Royal Philips
• Hamilton dos Santos, Aberje
• Rita Men, University of Florida
• Yanique Woodall, The Home Depot

Operating Committee members up for re-election were:

• Stacey Bailey, Kavli Foundation
• Caroline Gibson, Prosek
• Peter McDermott, Korn Ferry
• Grant Toups, ICF Next

Officers re-elected for 2021 include:

• Chair: Marjorie Benzkofer, FleishmanHillard
• Treasurer: Umayma Abubakar, Mubadala
• Secretary: Grant Toups, ICF Next