As recently as 2004, NAAEE was providing very little in the way of member benefits through electronic means.  We realized however that a large portion of our interaction with members was through electronic channels such as email, listservs, and web sites.   In fact, it's possible that the majority, perhaps over 75%, of interaction we have with our members outside of our annual conference is electronic. 

We realized that we had to begin building ways to provide members benefits through our electronic media and we realized we had significant assets to build on including:

• EE-Link -- The Yahoo of EE on the Internet.  A site with superior search and an organized directory of over 4000 links that's updated and maintained on a daily basis.
• EE-News -- The bi-weekly news listserv that reaches over 6000 evironmental educators.
• State Databases -- aka the "Online Information Clearinghouse" or OIC -- is a tool that contains over 5000 programs and over 3000 organizations in 10 different states and 2 regional/national programs.
• EE Jobs -- A weekly email news letter containing a listing of jobs that are of interest to people in the EE community.

And that's just a few of the assets NAAEE has. 

What's an Electronic Member Benefit Anyway?

What we needed to do was connect the information assets we have to our membership. We needed to improve the quality of EE-News and EE-Link and also to help assure that our membership was properly represented in these leading electronic media. To say nothing about us needing to build new media as well such as Blogging, an Article site, and other tools later in 2006 and 2007.

An electronic membershp benefit then becomes a link listing on EE-Link, a news listing on EE-News or a Organizational listing in the OIC.

Building Electronic Member Benefits

Since the late 1990's NAAEE members as well as the public have been able to suggest free link listings on EE-Link.  In the future, NAAEE members will be given preferential placement on EE-Link when they suggest a link. This process of highlighting the links of NAAEE members will not only provide organizations additional incentive to join NAAEE but will also improve the quality of EE-Link by making sure that the leading organizations and resources are featured prominently in EE-Link.

We are accomplishing the task of building these electronic member benefits by developing a custom membership management database that allows our staff and members to associate EE-Link links and other listings with a member's membership profile.  By associating our listings with specific members, we can make all sorts of benfits occur such as providing priority placement in EE-Link to NAAEE members.

This is technology that is going to roll out for NAAEE in the summer of 2006 and it will eventually include EE-Link, EE-News, our Online Information Clearinghouse, and EE-Jobs.