"To deliver our ambitious strategic aims, we need to maintain the BSI as a sector-leading organisation."
Survey feedback on core text
How could or should the text or meaning of this be changed or improved?
'Sector-leading'
What does this mean?
Need to clarify the 'sector' - academic, charity, clinical, industry?
What organisations are we comparing ourselves to? Other membership organisations or health charities, or others?
Need to clarify what we are leading.
"Leading scientific charity" etc might be more appealing to members.
General
Be more ambitious in the wording - the BSI should thrive to become a bigger, more diverse, more understanding and empathetic organisation through DEI and membership drives, whilst maintaining financial sustainability.
Should it not just be that 'the BSI needs to have strong foundations; financial, organisational and leadership, so energy can be put into fulfilling the aims.'?
Workshop exercise: exploration of
"a sector-leading organisation"
The attendees were asked for comments the words 'sector' and leading'.
Results for 'sector' question are grouped below.
Question: "What words could we use to can clarify 'sector'? What should sector refer to?"
Add a separate definition of sector / community on top of our strategy statement, so to clarify what it refers to every time the word 'sector' or 'community' is used in the whole strategy document
Other learned societies
referring to us as a learned society
scientific society
Life science / membership organisations
Sector perhaps is used to cover industry, policy, and academic work, but is perhaps too generic a term to use
To deliver our ambitious strategic aims, we need to maintain the reputation and visibility of the BSI (nationally and internationally)
Sector is not fixed. Needs renaming.
Maybe just remove the word, and be a 'leading organisation'?
word sector needs reframing. should refer to UK immunology research - UK immunol research capacity
Sector is an easy way to box relevant groups impacted by immunology - instead of cross sector, approaching the problem from the perspectives that we are all impacted by and are immunologists, regardless of sector we work in, helps break down barriers (although this means delivery of other commitments needs to be sector-agnostic)
Sector is relatively non-specific, prefer to enhance the statement with more specificity. Adding specificity also helps with what the BSI will focus on in the next 5 years (recognising that some topics will fall outside of that focus).
Immunology in general, global leader Academic field. Health bioscience
The fields and areas we work in or want to engage with
Comparing to other learned societies in UK is helpful for realistic goals within UK context, but might be more interesting to compare to what immunology societies do/provide in other countries. If BSI is face of UK immunology in an international context, does this project strength in the field compared to other countries?/ regions.
'Sector' does not mean anything to me
I don't like the word sector
Results for 'leading' question are grouped below.
Question: "What should or could 'leading' mean or refer to?"
Trailblazing
Advocate
The best doing things first Trailblazer
The go-to, showing avant-garde, aware of new discoveries and directions, respectable, reliable, informative
Be the best we can be
Trusted
Leadership forward thinking
Respected authority influential
Globally
In Europe
In the UK.
Leading should mean a well respected, go-to organisation that is agile to respond to need, and have the resource (financial and time) to support and develop
Recognised and trusted organisation in the field which is a critical point of contact going forward
Go to point for information pertaining to immunology
We need benchmarks to measure ourselves against, measuring ourselves against our KPIs but also including our role as an employer, supporting, enabling and developing our staff to deliver In this context I think we should be comparing ourselves to other learned societies
Research impact & impact awareness
"Leading" only works if there is a way to measure the degree of leadership - leading whom and where?
Highest impact in measurable metrics; best support for community in terms of career development/ funds/ public engagement
Leading means in the top 5 %, but could also be misinterpreted as dishonest
Draw on the incredible UK heritage in immunology (INCL 5+ Nobel Prizes)
Enablers commitments and aims
We will do this by:
Creating a larger and more diverse engaged membership
Embedding equality, diversity and inclusion in all our activities
Ensuring the Society’s financial sustainability
Our aims:
Introduce a refreshed membership scheme to increase the size and diversity of our membership, while also increasing membership engagement opportunities
Implement our new Diversity and Inclusion Strategy to be a positive force for change within immunology
Deliver our income diversification plan to reduce reliance on journal income, ensuring we are financially secure to support futuregenerations of immunologists
Empower our staff team to enable them to continue to deliver sector-leading work for the benefit of our members and delivery of our mission
Commitments - survey results
42.1% of respondents
...believe we should add or remove a commitment, or move any of the commitments into one of the three core areas
Suggestions
- First two overlap - could these be combined?
- Add something around networking and seasoned members pro-actively championing more junior ones.
- "Financial sustainability" feels out of place here
- Not sure it should be an enabler to always aim for creating an ever larger membership.
- Specific mention of cross-sector engagement within the 'diverse' statement.
Aims - survey feedback and results
Respondent ordering of impact so far, where 1 has had the most impact.
- Deliver our income diversification plan to reduce reliance on journal income, ensuring we are financially secure to support futuregenerations of immunologists.
- Empower our staff team to enable them to continue to deliver sector-leading work for the benefit of our members and delivery of our mission.
- Introduce a refreshed membership scheme to increase the size and diversity of our membership, while also increasing membership engagement opportunities.
- Implement our new Diversity and Inclusion Strategy to be a positive force for change within immunology.
General feedback on aims - would you add or change or remove?
Key issue is engagement with members which could be added to EDI aim
There is still more that can be done to improve workplace culture in immunology - guidelines on this could evolve from the diversity and inclusion policy?
"Empower our staff team to enable them to continue to deliver sector- leading work for the benefit of our members and delivery of our mission": this is very vague in its current format. The specifics of empowerment are the key between this being filler and a point.
Diversity of membership - we can make categories of memberships, but how are we encouraging folk into them?
Instead of 'to increase the size...' - change to a 'refreshed membership scheme to increase diversity and increase engagement opportunities'
Consider adding aim about identifying under-served sections of the membership in terms of most likely to leave sector or have other barriers to delivering impactful immunology research.
Suggest a mention of cross-sector collaboration or engagment, within the first comment.
We are not utilizing our Emeritus members optimally.
- Deliver our income diversification plan to reduce reliance on journal income, ensuring we are financially secure to support futuregenerations of immunologists.
Workshop exercise on enabler categories
Groups were asked to feedback on existing and potential enablers.
Their comments are in the documents below.
1. Membership as an enabler
2. DE&I as an enabler
3. Financial sustainability as an enabler
4. Staff and culture as an enabler