About BIRAs
Recent
Changes
BIRAs is run by a committee of
volunteers, committed to the main remit of the association, namely the
organisation of a series of high quality meeting, bringing together
researchers from industry and academia, run at a minimum cost. Members of
BIRAs will be aware that for the last couple of years their have been
several changes in BIRAs, although these have not affected our ability to
organise the series of scientific meetings that is the main remit of BIRAs.
For example, over the last few years members of the Committee, like most
working in industry and academia, have found it difficult to devote the
amounts of time, that they used to be able to, to ancillary activities like
BIRAs. Thus BIRAs has found it difficult to maintain the regular Newsletter
that we used to produce and mail out ourselves. However, the growth of the
internet now means that we can instead communicate with our members through
this web site and by email, thereby reducing both time and costs, giving BIRAs
more of both to devote to its meetings.
In addition, we have chosen this time to
improve the efficiency of the services we offer our members. As one step
towards this, we are moving to Direct Debit, rather than Standing Order
payments, for collection of membership fees. This makes it easier to
both collect and record membership payments, with the minimum of work for both
you and BIRAs. At the same time, in order to communicate more
efficiently with our members, we are asking you to let us have your email
address. This will allow us to send out meeting forms and posters directly to
you or notify you when they are available for download from the web site.
The membership fee has not increased for
several years, although obviously the cost of meetings, etc. has, and thus we
are taking this opportunity to increase our membership fee. However, it is
still relatively low at £20.00 per year (see membership
for more details) and we aim to keep this fee as low as possible in future
years. We are also taking this opportunity to issue our members with a
membership number, so that we can deal with your membership enquiries more
easily. Given the merging of several companies we are also aware that details
for some our members have probably changed. It is also some time since we
updated our membership records. We are thus asking all members to complete and
submit a new membership form along with the Direct Debit form to allow BIRAs
to update its records and administer many of these changes.
Eventually, BIRAs plans to
contract out the administrative duties associated with membership,
subscription and communication to a professional secretariat service. The
above administrative changes will greatly facilitate such a change and keep
administrative costs to a minimum.
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