The Meeting Structure
The EuRA council meet three times a year, to steer the associations activities and act as the creative voice of the membership. The last meeting took place in late September in Rome.
This last meeting of the year always takes place in the city for the following conference so that everyone on the council has the chance to test the hospitality of the venue and report back on any issues. This year, we are very pleased to say, issues were very minimal and the quality of hospitality we were shown by the Crowne Plaza was excellent. And we have used some excellent hotels for our conferences!
Our meetings take place over two days. Day one covers all of the meetings of the committees of EuRA. The Presidents Group (The President, Vice President, General Secretary and Operations Manager) meet early, and the rest of the committees meet from noon, to allow the council members to arrive. The Marketing and PR groups meet as well as the training body. The conference committee will also meet, and then these meetings are fed back to the full council from 16:00 until 19:00. The council then meet for dinner and continue to work. Day Two is the council meeting proper from 08:30, where new ideas and directions are discussed, any constitutional matters are resolved and on going projects are overseen. This meeting then ends by 15:30 to allow council members to get to the airport to return home.
Day One - September 27th
New Projects
The most important topic for discussion at this meeting was the finalisation of the huge project we have been working on for the last year, and of course this remains secret until it is launched at the Frankfurt Members’ Day – if you have not booked to attend, click here!!! But, we finalised the plans, signed the papers and toasted the future!
The Rome Conference
The venues are all chosen, and contracts signed. The Crowne Plaza is a central hotel with excellent conference facilities and some of the largest guest rooms in Rome. Council members were very happy with the quality of the venue, the catering and the service levels. Some small issues were resolved, such as the long wait at check in. This was due to a new computer system, linked with staff shortage, and much as we can all appreciate that this type of thing happens, it cannot happen during our conference. Therefore the hotel will open a specific room check-in service for our guests. These are the kind of issues that we can only know from experience of the venue.
The intellectual content of the conference is in the final planning stages, with an excellent outline programme and some inspiring speakers already on board.
Our venue for the final night party (The Rockin’ Roman Rave) is spectacular, with some of the best views across Rome from the terraces. Again, this will be a night to remember and the conference committee have been planning a number of surprises to celebrate our tenth anniversary.
The Frankfurt Members’ Day
The annual Members’ Day plans are now fully formed, with an excellent speaker, Dr Elizabeth McMillan, delivering a morning session on Change Management. The afternoon session of the event will be devoted to the launch of our new initiative. The venue is organised and the rooms have been checked.
Marketing
The glossary of terms is now complete and ready for publication. Ongoing projects include the COLIBA (our cost of living index) and the Country Profiles. These are being revived and updated to include a higher level of content including immigration procedures.
PR
Two major projects are going to dominate EuRA’s PR calendar for the next year, the new project being launched at the Members’ Day and the ongoing project to encourage members to use EuRA as part of their PR programmes.
Training and EARP
Rome conference training will be “Event Training”, a combination of information and entertainment and for the first time, each session will be repeated, to allow for smaller groups. Also discussed was the regional training programme, with Immigration training taking place in Malmo in October and legal training taking place in Frankfurt in November.The training programme for 2008 will be ready for publication at the start of December.
Day Two - September 28th
The second day of meetings was almost entirely taken up with the final details of our new project which will be launched in Frankfurt at the Members’ Day.
The council were also brought up to date by Tad, on office activities. The EuRA office has been restructured and we now have a dedicated EuRA administrator, Maria Manly, taking over all EuRA administrative functions, including events admin, memberships, and day to day office activities. Maria will join Tad, Dominic and the members in Frankfurt on November 30th. For more information about Maria, click here. Maria comes to us from Rothchilds bank in London and is originally from Tuscany. She speaks English, Italian and German and we are very glad to have her on board.