Chapter of the Year Award
Nomination Period Closed
Objective
The objective of this award is to encourage Chapters to serve their local members by supporting:
- Development and execution of Chapter annual plan.
- Service its members in the technical area through organizing local Chapter activities, such as technical meetings, education, tutorials, industry visits, community service projects etc.
- Actions that keep Chapter volunteers active and maintain continuity of Chapter volunteers.
- Actions that help members with advancement to higher membership grades (senior and fellow).
- Actions that support EPS membership recruitment.
- Actions that support EPS awards solicitation.
- Establish means to recognize outstanding activities and to spread well-working practices.
Nominations
Nominations are solicited from the local EPS Chapter Chairs as self-nominations and according to the annual EPS Major Awards timeline. Winning chapter receives:
- Certificates for all registered Officers
- Monetary award of US$ 2,000 towards chapter leadership activities (this applies to all chapters, including joint chapters)
The award shall be presented annually in conjunction with local EPS Flagship conference, ECTC for Regions 1 – 7 and 9, ESTC for Region 8, and EPTC for Region 10 (or any other event considered most suitable for the winning chapter), to representative(s) of the winning Chapter.
The Award Process
This section describes in detail how a candidacy should be nominated, describes the principles and criteria according to which members of the Awards Committee shall assess and evaluate the candidates, and guides how the nominations report should be prepared.
Minimum Requirements for Chapter Candidacy
The following requirements must be met by the chapter to be nominated for candidacy. Should any of the three requirements fail to be fulfilled, nomination will be rejected, and the candidate will not be presented to the Awards Committee for evaluation.
As a minimum requirement, the Chapter must have:
1. The chapter must have been active for the minimum of two (2) years (preferably longer), even though the evaluation of the Chapter of the Year Award is based only on the performance of the previous year.
2. The chapter shall not have won the Chapter of The Year Award (of any IEEE society) for the immediate three (3) preceding years.
3. The Chapter has ensured continuity for the current year
a. initiated the Chapter Annual Plan for the current year, which establishes goals and objectives in each or most areas of the selection criteria toward achieving the award. These goals and objectives should subsequently be documented in the nomination proposal (e.g. by attaching a memo from the meeting where the annual plan was approved).
b. assigned people in key roles (through elections or appointments) with the responsibility to implement these plans and achieve results and updated them in vTools.
Criteria Based on Which the Performance of Chapters are Assessed
The evaluation criteria for selecting the chapter best qualified to receive the Chapter of the Year Award will be based on the following requirements:
1. Technical programs: How Chapter provides service to its members in the technical area. The meetings must be advertised and open to Chapter members. Purely administrative meetings cannot be counted as technical meetings, but administrative meetings can be organized in conjunction of the technical meetings. Technical meetings can be either physical or virtual. Quality of the meetings is an important assessment criterion so put some effort to presenting the nature each event briefly. Note that all meetings must have been recorded in vTools Events in a timely manner within the time limits of each reporting year.
2. Educational programs: How Chapter provides service to its members in the educational area. An educational program may consist of tutorials, short courses, lecture series, or other activity directly related to the education of Chapter members.
3. Plan to secure continuity of Chapter volunteers: How Chapter has secured its own vitality and continuity. Chapter leadership has established and documented practices that ensures to the best possible extent that all volunteers remain active in their role, term limits are obeyed, and eligibility criteria are followed in all elections and appointments. The consecutive period of service in any one office shall not exceed four years and all officers shall not serve in any one position more than six years in total. Exceptions to this rule require approval by the President of EPS. Chapter officer history should also show rotation of positions and continuity in officer roles. In practice this means that the nominator should provide list of chapter officers from the past eight (8) years, or from the whole lifetime, if the chapter is less than eight (8) years of age. All changes must be recorded in vTools Officers reporting in a timely manner.
4. Actions to support membership advancement: Creating awareness of higher-grade IEEE membership and identification of candidates who might qualify for member grade elevation is an important task of all IEEE Chapters. A high-performing chapter should have systematic means and a track record of promoting membership advancement by Senior Member and Fellow nominations. This will be measured by evidence that the chapter has promoted recognition of local members to higher membership grades.
5. Membership recruitment: Increase of members in the Chapter is one essential evaluation criteria. Instead of just presenting historical membership data (from the OU Analytics database) attention should be placed on presenting all active means of active means of member recruitment, retention, and recovery that the chapter may have been engaged with.
6. Awards solicitation: A high-performing Chapter actively nominates and/or supports candidates from its membership base for EPS major awards. Being a nominator for a candidate outside of own Chapter membership base is also recognized as a merit.
7. Community service projects: Chapters are encouraged to organize activities that impact the wider society. Ideally, such engagements are performed through identifying local concerns, figuring out how the expertise of chapter volunteers can be utilized to make an impact, and carrying out projects to improve the quality of life in their communities.
8. Additional activities/information: Although the selection of the Chapter of the Year will be primarily based on the seven evaluation criteria described above, do include any additional information that you see relevant to supporting your candidate in the letter of nomination.
Instructions for Nominators in Preparing the Report
Chapter representative(s) must submit their nomination of candidacy to the EPS Awards Committee via EPS Awards website according to the annual Major Awards timeline.
The official Chapter Chair is the chair of record as of 31 December, the previous year. This letter of nomination should also review the chapter’s performance in each area listed in the selection criteria for the period covered by the award and must be received no later than the deadline announced separately for the Major Awards nominations each year.
The nominators are instructed to follow the following guidelines when submitting their nomination report:
- Organize the report in sections that follow the same order of activities as outlined in the instructions, i.e.: a) Summary of Technical Programs, b) Summary of Educational Programs, etc.
- Do not overwhelm the judges by attaching irrelevant or subjective material. Include only pertinent information, i.e., meeting programs, activity descriptions, attendance statistics etc. Including photos and other graphical elements are encouraged to the extent that they provide evidence of the reported information.
- Add to the beginning of each section a short summary describing the corresponding activities, the results and why, in the chapter’s opinion, it is considered that the results were good, novel, unique etc.
- For any additional information that you would like to provide to the those criteria that allow additional points to be awarded based upon a demonstrated program (advancements, nominations, and membership development), the report must describe these programs in some detail in order to receive additional points.
Eligibility for nomination
All chapter of the year award candidates must fulfill the following minimum criteria:
1. Chapter must have been active for minimum of two (2) years (preferably longer) and have fulfilled the minimum requirements of chapter reporting and vitality over all the years.
2. Initiated the Chapter Annual Plan for the current year, which establishes goals and objectives in each or most areas of the selection criteria toward achieving the award.
3. Assigned people in key roles (through elections or appointments) with the responsibility to implement these plans and achieve results. The list of officers and volunteer must be updated in vTools by the time of submission.
4. The chapter shall not have won the Chapter of The Year Award for the immediate three (3) preceding years.