Minutes

I’ve been lucky to have been involved in this association for almost half a decade now. Which is both parts equally impressive and scary. There’s absolutely more grey in my hair than there used to be! But in that time, despite having several roles (membership officer, PR officer, chair and now an advisory role), I don’t think we ever did a meta post on how we actually operate. So here we are! It’s worth noting that this is a volunteer-led organisation. And over the years, particularly this year, the remit and goals of the association have shifted. When I joined, the big challenge was educating the public on what an EV is, isn’t and the lifestyle shift around it. We spent inordinate amounts of time talking about “total cost of ownership” to get over the hump of EVs being more expensive at retail than ICE equivalents. We’ve also spend a lot of time talking about infrastructure; something that’s shifted away from “there’s none!” to the most appropriate deployment of it considering in the next 10 years, _everyone_ who owns a car will have an EV. Our mission today is more complex. We need to do a bigger job of educating the industry around us; particularly forecourts, dealerships and businesses in Ireland. The transition is happening, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. But what’s appropriate, useful and tied to a shift in thinking around climate targets and incorporating public & active travel is a huge source of debate. Knowing the modal shift we’re almost always in year-over-year as an association, I thought it would be good to talk about how we orientate ourselves. Before I dig in it’s worth noting that all of this is possible thanks to our members. That’s where we derive our goals, mission and small amount of money to keep the lights on. We’ve not so much as ever had a pint as a group with that money. If you gift us €20 per year, that is genuinely going towards the goals we have as an organisation to electrify the fleet of Ireland in a just transition. Nothing else. Organisational structure The association is organised with 11 volunteers. Frankly, this is probably too many folks. But in reality we have space for 10 and 1 “president” role, a figurehead who can represent us publicly. To-date, we’ve needed people to roll their sleeves up and do work more than we’ve needed a figurehead. We’ve done well with our website & social content as a draw for folks to come to us. Each year we tend to see some attrition, which is good, as it allows new faces to come on-board. This happens at a public election cycle each year around April during our AGM. This year was the first hybrid event with an in-person cohort alongside live streaming, which was wonderful! We have a chair and vice chair alongside several key roles (memberships, PR, etc. etc.). These roles tend to rotate as people come/go and wind up too busy with personal or _actual_ work to dedicate extra time to the association, which is fine as it, once again, introduces new folks with new ideas and energy into the mix. The second order impact of having this many folks on the committee is it can be a bit easy to disappear and not be productive, at a time when we really need productivity. We’ve never really brought in a mechanism to ensure folks are contributing, because it’s volunteer work so you can’t really introduce a stick when there’s no real carrot! This structure gives way to another layer of structure. We have a committee meeting monthly to discuss what’s going on, who’s doing what, planning, etc. And tend to public those minutes here on the site. But we also have sub-committees to give micro-organisational structure to specific parts of the operations. Obvious ones are around lobbying, infrastructure and events. Less obvious are corporate memberships and newsletter planning. Each of these have their own “chair” and a few folks who care deeply about that topic. Tech When I joined, most of the association was being run out of a few Google sheets. Which was a nightmare. At the time I worked for a company called HubSpot, so introduced that suite to the association in order to bring order to the chaos. Myself and the then PR officer, Guillaume, spent months cleaning up the sheets so that we could end up with a clean list of actual members who wanted to hear from us. I clicked import, and a new chapter of tech-savvy IEVA began (ish)! Today, we lean into HubSpot as our CRM to automate tasks around membership lists (mainly sorting paid folks from free members) and marketing, automating social media posts, sending our newsletters out, etc. A few years ago I switched jobs to join the Irish-founded payments suite, Stripe. Before I implemented Stripe’s features to allow members make an annual subscription that we could properly track and allow members to manage that subscription, we just used PayPal donations. Which required a lot of manual effort to reconcile a member’s payment to a tick-box in the CRM to say they were currently paid up. It took a lot of work to setup who had voting rights pre-AGM. This year was the first year we’ve had clean payment data from Stripe into HubSpot, and it took minutes to establish what once took, genuinely, weeks. Some smaller, but not insignificant things we also do are, for example, surveys. We tend to lean into Google Forms for this as it’s an easy store of data and makes it handy to write up content around the results. But we have a committee member who works at SAP, so have used Qualtrics for deep insights into survey data in the past. Particularly when we run a survey in partnership with a corporate member. And then there’s the site itself, which runs on WordPress, which isn’t _that_ remarkable. But again, thanks to the work of a former committee member, we were a beta tester on Blacknight’s new platform to dramatically increase the speed of the site. Community I wanted to jot a note down on community. Because we don’t work without it. I think most of us are sick of using Facebook, but it is our largest generator of interest and comment. It’s a bit of a source of pride to have such a huge, thriving Facebook group. Even our other social media outlets have garnered great responses from the community. That, by-and-large, is you! For paid annual members, we also have a Slack group to be a bit less Facebooky! And we plug into wider groups of EV associations (particularly our colleagues in NI and England) as well as GEVA. Concluding In short, there’s a lot that goes into the operation of our association. But many years into this, we are thousands of members strong, have great corporate member interest and a complex, but humming operating model. Our goals are to create a thriving ecosystem between our members and corporate members who share interests in electrifying Ireland’s fleet & addressing the climate crisis. If you want to know more about how we operate or have questions, just drop me a line. If this was interesting to you, maybe consider becoming a member to help keep the lights on. Or volunteer for the next tranche of committee memberships!