EuRA Board Report November 2017
The Board of EuRA, or rather EuRA’s Executive Group, which is the official title of the steering group of the association, meets three times a year and the latest meeting took place alongside the final site visit for the EuRA Conference in Dubrovnik. In order to keep costs low, we try as often as possible to combine a Board Meeting with a site visit. The agenda for this meeting began with the annual review of the EuRA global Quality Seal and our Strategic Consultant for quality, Martina Scharwey outlined the changes proposed for the 2018/2019 Standard. Each year we try to keep the Standard as relevant to the needs of members as possible so this year Martina undertook some in depth research and analysis into the General Data Protection Regulation which comes into force on May 18th next year. This is no small matter which will affect us all and at first sight looks extremely complex. There is no doubt that the impact of the GDPR on our industry is going to be profound and far reaching and will significantly increase the compliance burden on members. Our Strategic Consultant for Legal, Gordon Kerr is working closely with Martina and the RMC’s to develop a short form guidance document that we hope will be ready for publication in January. Martina has implemented all of the GDPR requirements into the Quality Standard, so certified members will have full guidance on how to build GDPR compliance into their processes. This is the most significant and wide ranging change to the EGQS in some years, but the work done by Martina and the Board removes a huge amount of the uncertainty around how this is all going to impact on relocation providers.
The next two days of meetings covered EuRA business in a range of arenas. Unlike other organsations, EuRA involves the whole Board in all decision making. We don’t have committees working on different topics, the Board have total involvement in every aspect of the association from finance, to conferences, membership issues, training and CPD initiatives, legal issues etc. Two big topics for this meeting were deciding on the final content for the Dubrovnik conference and re-examining the membership structures of EuRA. Lots of new initiatives will be coming to a conference near you soon!
One thing the Board was completely unanimous about was their enthusiasm for our Dubrovnik venues. The Sun Gardens truly is a magnificent property and they all felt it will host us brilliantly.