APEC Women

Heads up: APECWomen.com will be open for registration soon

Below is a copy of the e-mail I circulated yesterday and today to those who have subscribed to WLN’s official website at apecWLN.org and/or have been involved with WLN previously.
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Hi, everyone

It only takes one APEC Women Leaders Network (WLN) meeting and it becomes starkly obvious: the missed opportunities for effectively connecting with the hundreds of WLN delegates at the meeting.

Many of us go in cold (just as I did when I went to my first WLN in 2007), not knowing a single soul. We definitely come out of it a bit warmer — but for many, not much warmer, I’d argue. Sure, there’ll be the occasional luck when you accidentally sit next to someone at lunch and find out that, yes, you do have common interests that can form the basis for doing something together. But why leave it to chance when we’re putting our money and time in to be at the meeting?

Why does making connections at WLN meetings have to be so haphazard? And I’m just talking about the missed opportunities DURING the meeting itself. Many of the connections established at these meetings are often difficult to sustain, much less to strengthen, due to time, distance and other factors.

For many of these delegates, particular those from the host economies, attendance at a WLN is a one-off. We lose the bulk of the delegates every year — WLN is like running a business (and a multinational business at that without a global HQ) with a 20%-30% annual customer retention rate. Think of all the lost opportunities for connecting women across APEC economies with such a high attrition rate.

The problem is clear and obvious. And so is the solution. In fact, the solution is so clear that I created the http://www.apecwomen.com website back in early 2008 to provide, among others, a virtual hub for WLN delegates to connect with each other in-between the annual WLN meetings. But the timing wasn’t right for me to get involved intensely with something like it at that time so I took the site down after a few months.

Fast forward 2010 and this I can say: I’m ready. I have been developing the (new) apecwomen.com site for weeks now. The first part of the site, at http://posts.apecwomen.com, is technically live now but cannot yet accept your (free) registrations (here’s why: http://posts.apecwomen.com/2010/05/almost-there/). I’m working towards getting the site live sometime this month. If you subscribe to the e-mail notification service (http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=apecwomen&loc=en_US), or provide me with your e-mail address via the contact form provided, you’d be notified when the site is ready to accept your registration.

Don’t forget: http://posts.apecwomen.com (you will be redirected here if you go to http://www.apecwomen.com). With the 2010 WLN in Tokyo only a few months away, now is the time to connect with each other so that we’ll be further down the track (discussion and negotiation) by the time we actually meet each other face-to-face in September.

See you at the site soon.

Regards,
Grace