What can an INFORMS chapter do during COVID-19? Plenty.

In 2019, as the then vice president of the INFORMS Chicago Chapter, I led the effort of creating a strategic plan for 2020. Along with the 2019 core team, we identified six focus areas and associated goals. 

In January 2020, when I commenced my role as chapter president, things were looking good. The board had approved the strategic plan, and we started putting together events for the year. The first event planned was a kickoff of a new student chapter at Northern Illinois University – a unique opportunity for our chapter to help jump-start another. The second was a Women in Analytics panel that would highlight the contributions of women in the field.

Then in February, COVID-19 was identified as a global pandemic and our whole world changed.

Fast forward four months and we wrapped up June with four virtual events. We had a resume review event followed by a two-episode COVID-19 webinar series, and the last week of June we hosted an online career fair [1].

In this article, I want to share our chapter’s journey during these COVID-19 times, hoping that it will be an inspiration to other chapters around the country.

Be bold and flexible. The initial couple of months after the pandemic was declared were shrouded in uncertainty. All of our volunteers, and millions of others around the world, were quickly re-adjusting and refocusing on being effective in the new health, work and economic environments. Even during this time, we had regular committee meetings to assess the situation. One by one we canceled or moved the events we had planned for Q1 and Q2. We did not want to lapse into inactivity and take a wait-and-see approach. If there was a time that the chapter had to be active and relevant, it was now more than ever.

Our first step was to gauge the chapter members’ capability and appetite for online events, and, if they could participate, what kind of events would be most relevant for them. Our members were still interested in online events and, not surprisingly, the hot topics were COVID-19 and career help. We quickly pivoted and shifted our approach.

To highlight analytics applications related to COVID-19, our team organized a COVID-19 webinar series. We reached out to various professors and practitioners in the field. Sanjay Mehrotra from Northwestern University gave a talk on “Modeling Supply Chain Decisions for Ventilator Allocation.” Sheldon Jacobson from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign shared how risk-based thinking can help navigate a COVID-19 world.

The job market has not been doing well for experienced practitioners who recently lost their jobs or for newly graduating students, some of whom even had their job offers rescinded. To help with this situation, our chapter organized a resume review, a webinar and a virtual career fair. We had about 30 students submit resumes and our volunteers from the board and committee gave the students professional feedback and suggestions. Katie Ferguson from Burtch Works led the session with a webinar on the impact of COVID-19 on hiring in analytics.

The virtual career fair was by far our largest event this year. We had six companies and about 80 applicants participate. The first part of the event involved the companies giving quick overviews about themselves and their open positions. The second part was organized as breakout rooms where the candidates could interact with representatives from each of the companies.

By keeping an open ear and staying flexible, the chapter was able to conduct events that were relevant to the current environment and needs of our members.

You are as strong as your team. Creating a strong and cohesive chapter team requires focus and attention. There was a big turnover in our board the last quarter of 2019, and we were starting out the year very short-staffed. We could have panicked and recruited anyone and everyone to fill the spots.

However, we knew that organizing events for the local analytics community, as we had been doing for the past three years, requires more than a randomly put together team. It requires a set of highly motivated individuals, working cohesively, willing to roll up their sleeves without regard to their “level” in the industry.

To this end, we created the Volunteer Action Committee that would be a platform where aspirants to the board can join, be a person-in-charge (“PIC”) for one or two events and experience first-hand how all this works. Our vice president, Madhuri Gupta, and I took time out of our schedules to interview applicants to make sure that they understood our work culture and the commitments they were signing up for. Soon we had five new members join the team who were driven and committed.

I am delighted to say that we have a great team today. Three of the four events in June were led by volunteers from the Action Committee.

Keep in contact with the mothership. Because our chapter board is relatively small and our volunteer hours are very limited, we could not do everything without support from INFORMS headquarters staff. We leaned heavily on INFORMS for marketing and technology. India Williams, community relations associate, and her team helped us market the events via INFORMS marketing channels. She also helped with setting up event pages on INFORMS Connect, registration pages in Zoom and coordination on the day of the events. This helped us focus our tight volunteer hours on speaker and company recruitment and organization of the events.

We relied completely on INFORMS’ Zoom account and features. Not only did this save us valuable time (and money) in going through a vendor selection process, we were able to effectively use the breakout room functionality for both the resume review and career fair events.

Where Do We Go Next?

The thing with organizing chapter activities is that the passion is self-propelling. After a very short break from a hectic June, we have started planning the next event – the 2020 INFORMS Regional Analytics Conference.

Breaking away from our AI-based themes of the recent years (“Demystifying AI” in 2018, “Operationalizing AI” in 2019), our theme this year is “Analytics to the Rescue,” highlighting the relevance of analytics to solve our emerging issues, problems and challenges.

We will have to be very creative and apply our learnings from the June events to organize an effective conference. The conference being fully virtual provides unique challenges (for example, how will sponsor booths work?) and opportunities (we can expand beyond the Midwest). At the same time, we are also constantly keeping an eye out for the emerging COVID-19 situation and the possible second wave and how that would affect our planning.

I don’t know what the future holds for the Chicago Chapter, but I am confident we will be ready to face it.

Reference

1. https://connect.informs.org/chicago/events-chicago/past-webinars