April 2020/edition #9

Message from the CIB President Keith Hampson
RE-INVIGORATING CIBDear Colleagues and Members,
It is extraordinary how much has changed in every country of the world since my last newsletter only
six weeks ago. I hope this finds all CIB members, your families and colleagues healthy, and looking
after each other’s safety and well-being during this period of the COVID-19 challenge.
At CIB we have taken the opportunity to focus on reinvigorating our value proposition, back-officesystems and processes, and yes, website. Our new CEO Don Ward is working with Ron Wakefield,
Chair of our Membership and Communications Committee as well as the Programme Committee
and Michael Behm as Programme Director to prepare a new Membership and Marketing Strategy toenable us to offer and communicate a better value proposition to members, improve retention ofexisting members, and target a recruitment campaign. This strategy will be considered by theupcoming June Board meeting and implementation will follow once it is approved. Please makeevery effort to respond to the Member Survey which the Secretariat has issued, as this will provide
an important input to this strategy. Completing the survey takes 5-10 minutes, and if you can’t find it
in your inbox please click here and Debbie can re-send.
Unfortunately the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns meant that we had to convert the upcoming Board
meeting and General Assembly to online sessions, and cancel other face-to-face activities which we
had planned, including a half-day conference and various breakout sessions with the Board andWorking Commission Coordinators. I am very sorry to Thorkild Ærø, Pro-Dean, Faculty of Engineeringand Science, Aalborg University, Copenhagen and his team who had worked hard and put together
an excellent programme to engage with local industry, new member prospects from across northern
Europe, and of course our Working Commission (WC) and Task Group (TG) Coordinators.

The new programme is for three two-hour sessions across 2nd – 4th June, in which we have ensured
that the General Assembly will take place and allocated as much time as possible for engagement
between the Board and WC and TG Coordinators, while still providing sufficient time for formal
Board business to be conducted. Everyone should have received details of the timings of thedifferent sessions, and I do hope you will be able to join relevant sessions.
The Board’s business will prioritise three main subjects: the new Membership and Marketing
Strategy; a new Programme Strategy with the Working Commissions; and the annual financial
accounts. The joint sessions with WC and TG Coordinators will seek to improve cross-communication
and understanding to improve value and impact of Commissions’ activities and outputs. Thesesessions will be informed by two teleconferences with Coordinators which Michael Behm isorganising. Michael has done a good job of reaching out to facilitate better engagement with theWorking Commissions, which I see as the central engine room of our CIB, and if you are a
Coordinator then I hope you will be able to work with Mike to help us support your work better.
One bonus of the online format forced upon us should be that we get more participation in the opensessions. We will learn from how it goes, and I hope that providing an online option may become astandard feature of our future meetings of the Board, General Assembly and other key events –without detracting from the enhanced value that attendance in person offers.
Finally, may I repeat my wish that you to stay safe and well. When we emerge from thesecircumstances it is likely that many features of life as we once knew it will have changed forever. I
believe that the role of innovators in the built environment will have an even more important role
than previously. My plan is that this includes CIB, which I trust we will be able to reinvigorate withyour help to be an even stronger force in global built environment research and innovation.
Keith Hampson, CIB President
April 2020

For further information on this newsletter or any other aspect of CIB’s work, please contact Debbie
Gray, Membership & Marketing Manager, at debbie.gray@cibworld.org or +1 (613) 727 1481 x101.