Dear friends,

 

Our PanIIT USA 2014-15 team just finished 1/4th period of our term.  Our team's commitment has been very clear; we want to bring real value to each one of you.  We are committed to maximize the use of the infrastructure build by past teams.  We have identified three target audiences:

1. INDIVIDUAL ALUMNI: This is each one of you.  We are working on bringing value-added services to each one of you.
2. CHAPTERS:  We are looking at Chapters to be local franchisees who are committed to serve you.  Hence we are offering value added tools to chapters to make it easier for them to serve you and host successful local events.
3. CAMPUSES: The campus organizations are already working hard to serve the alumni from their campus.  We are working with the campus organizations to take best practices to each other and build tools synergizing on our shared strength.

Here are 10 things we have accomplished thus far and more are in the pipeline:

1. PANIIT GOALS DEFINED: We realized that with limited resources, the best way to be successful is to focus on a few critical initiatives. To achieve this, we wanted to have very clear goals for our organization as that is essential to assist the volunteer team to easily choose what we will work on.  The PanIIT USA Board defined our goals to be:
   1. Promote and enhance a common "IIT" brand for the IIT's and its Alumni (Branding)
   2. Offer common Alumni Services to help alumni achieve their professional and personal (or lifestyle) goals. 
2. CHAPTER SERVICES: The PanIIT USA Executive Team is now supporting 13 active chapters.  Our goal is to get to 20 chapters by the end of the year.  To achieve this we have built a one-on-one relationship with each chapter president, treating them like our internal clients.  We have launched the following initiatives to assist chapters
1. FREE EVENT REGISTRATION:  Chapters pay 3% to 5% of collections if they hire an event registration software.  If they do not do that, they have to put two to three volunteers to manage this.  Now PanIIT USA will provide chapters with free event registration, so chapters can focus on the events.
2. LOAN AND GRANTS TO LAUNCH EVENTS: Many a time a Chapter team has to take financial risk to plan an event.  PanIIT USA wants to take that risk away and be there to provide financial support to chapters, as needed.
3. CHAPTER HANDBOOK:  PanIIT USA Executive Team has developed a 10 page chapter handbook that documents best practices from all chapters.  This document is being used as the user manual for chapters to plan successful events.
4. CHAPTER REPRESENTATIVE ON BOARD: To hold the PanIIT USA Executive team accountable, we now have a chapter representative in the PanIIT USA Board.  The chapter representative will make all of us aware of the Chapter's needs and hold the executive team accountable to deliver value added to the chapters
3. WEBSITE PLAN: Having a vibrant functional website is very important to us. After building website structure, we have developed the templates for chapters.  We interviewed alumni in multiple cities to learn that an alumni needs the following information from his/her chapter
1.  Is there a chapter near me?
2.  Who is the contact (Name, picture, contact, information)
3. Is the chapter active (Show recent events)
4. When is the next event. The chapter templates are being populated with this information from each chapter. We will start going live with the chapter pages soon. After that we want to finish the rest of the site and focus on the look and feel of the site.  By October we will have a new site completely ready for you to use.
4. WOMEN'S GROUP:  PanIIT USA wants to have a strong women's group to focus on value added services to the group.  A woman's group was formed and the group has defined their overall purpose to be:
1. Create a communication platform (Linkedin, FB, newsletter, iit.org) to provide a forum for not only networking discussions amongst the IIT women alumni, but also a platform for: 
1. Mentoring/support opportunities
2. Proudly sharing the success stories of the IIT women alumni
3. Advertising/encouraging our IIT women to participate in high impact IIT Alumni related global eventsTo jumpstart the group, the PanIIT USA Executive Team has thrown a challenge to all campuses. Whichever IIT campus gets represented by more than 200 women alumni on the IIT Women Alumni LinkedIn Subgroup by August 15th, will have their campus women's hostel treated to a special dinner, sponsored by PanIIT USA.  Here is the current number of members by campus:  
   
   
   You can join the Women's Group at https://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=6655081
5.  DATABASE PROGRESS:  This the most important area of development as we want to have vibrant database using which each of you can have access to every alumni in USA.  To start with we are cleaning the database; we now have 10300 emails with contact information (up from 4,000 at the beginning of the year). A 10 member volunteer team from different chapters and campuses has built a plan for "how to harness the database for alumni services". The plan is in its final phase of review by the PanIIT USA Board and we want to launch this by the end of the year.  We are all excited as this will truly be an asset to each individual alumni.  
   As we work on the database, here is something that each of you should look into what LinkedIn has to offer in terms of the micro-site for each of the academic institutes including various IITs. Here is the one for IIT-Kgp: https://www.linkedin.com/edu/alumni?id=13500&trk=edu-up-nav-menu-alumni.  You can find the corresponding group for your campus.
6. PANIIT USA BYLAWS: The PanIIT USA bylaws have not been updated since 2007 and it needed a major review.  A Governance team has been formed and with their effort the board has approved an updated bylaws for PanIIT USA. This will be put on the website soon.
7. FINANCIAL TRANSPARENCY: This is a very critical area for any volunteer organization and under the leadership of the Finance team of the PanIIT USA Board, we have consolidated all funds in the PanIIT USA bank account.  Monthly financial overview is reviewed by the PanIIT USA Board and is put on the website as part of the minutes.
8. PANIIT INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY:   PanIIT USA felt that it is very important to protect the PanIIT brand.  The Executive team has filed for application and we are in the final process of getting the trademark for "PanIIT" and copyright for our logo.  The Governance team also has put a process in place to ensure proper usage of the logo and trademark.
9. CONFERENCE SUPPORT:   We are proud to support the 2014 Toronto Conference and have started to work with Bay Area Team. We want to bring all past conference wisdom to the Bay Area Team so that they get a jumpstart with the conference.
10. ONGOING SUPPORT:  The team takes pride on continuing all communication initiatives on LinkedIn and monthly PanIIT USA newsletter.

This progress has been possible because of the highly engaged PanIIT USA board members and every volunteer in the PanIIT Executive team.  We currently have 22 volunteers, whose work has brought us this far.  Each of them are committed to the cause of serving the alumni and are spending countless hours to achieve the shared goal. We are proud of the great start but know that continuing the passion and energy for the next 18 months is critical to finish what we have started.  And for that we need to hear from you.  We need your ideas, support, encouragement and above all you to join the team.  Your support is needed as we are getting ready to start the PanIIT USA branding initiative.  The PanIIT USA executive team wanted to first provide the alumni services before we take on the Branding initiative.

 

Excited to serve you,

 

Yours

 

[email protected] 

Venue:  Santa Clara Convention Center (SCCC), 5001 Great America Parkway , Santa Clara , CA 95054. 

Conference Hotel:  Hyatt Regency, Santa Clara , CA  ( conveniently located adjacent to the SCCC)

The convention center and hotel are located 6 miles from Mineta San Jose International Airport (SJC ) and is approximately a  40 minute  drive from San Francisco International Airport (SFO) and the Oakland International Airport (OAK)

Please plan to attend along with your family, batch mates, and friends.

Watch for details.
 

Sincerely

Subhash Tantry , Chair
Raj Shah, Co Chair
Roy daSilva Co Chair

"If Brazil wearing their yellow jerseys gets yellow cards, can we expect Chile wearing red jerseys to get red cards?" joked Sundy Srinivasan at the 9th Annual IIT Alumni of Greater Houston Bowling event held at Main Event in Stafford on Saturday, June 28.

IITAGH Bowling Registration Desk

 

Many of the women got to perfect their bowling technique and also support their favorite teams.

IIT Alumni Linkedin Group is a forum for IIT alumni from sixteen campuses to share ideas. It has emerged as a very vibrant resource for our community. We are now 25500+ strong and growing. The group is a great way to connect with fellow IITans living in your area, working in your industry or from your batch. It is great resource to find employers, employees, contacts or customers via qualified introductions on an opt-in basis. The members are finding it as a great place to discuss their ideas or to promote their products. In this forum everyday fellow alumni are posting articles on topics such as career advancement, learning about new technologies, gaining new leadership skills, as well as global politics and life in general.