Stakeholders often ask me about our AAS journey. When I joined the AAS, we were a small Association with over 5 decades of experience engaging Australian Alumni socially. To be able to enhance the service offerings and value to our members, we needed strong membership to attract sponsorship. We needed strong sponsorship to support quality activities, and we needed quality activities to increase membership and provide a return on investment and branding platform for our sponsors. To drive all of this, we also needed to have a solid, stable and professional Secretariat. My view is that membership, sponsorship and our activities are all closely interlinked.
My first two priorities were to appoint a professional Association Management Company as the secretariat and concurrently raise sponsorship to cover the costs. We appointed an Association Management Company as our Secretariat and with the help of H.E. Mr. Philip Green, National Australia Bank came on board as our Platinum Sponsor. That was a crucial breakthrough for the AAS. Today our sponsors include NAB Asia and JCU (Platinum), Lendlease, Westpac, FlightCentre (Gold), Hui and Kuah, Goshen Art Gallery, Crown Group, Jetstar and Singapore Airlines (Silver) and Qantas (Official Airline).
Building a reputation for the AAS cannot only be about what we do, it also has to be based on who we are. Key to our Alumni Association and both our Singaporean and Australian cultural DNA are our values – particularly those of fraternity, inclusion and unity. To underpin our foundations we have also instituted a new Code of Conduct and Ethics, at the Management Committee level, for all AAS Representatives. At our 62nd Annual General Meeting, we will invite our Members to endorse them both.
We have now published for stakeholder consultation, our AAS Strategic Plan 2017 to 2019. Aligned with the Australian Government “Global Alumni Engagement Strategy 2016-2020” and the Singapore- Australia CSP, we too are focused on accelerating our “connection to”, “engagement with” and “celebration of” our Australian Alumni Members.
Video: Paul Chia, Vice President, AAS
THE WAY FORWARD
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