Blog: What do we do for our members?

Pyry Meriluoto & Jenna Nikula
chair of the board and vice-chair of the board

Our tasks cross quite a lot. We steer the work of the board and development together. We create the guidelines and inform our local organizations on our events and also guide them i.e. how to act on a crisis situation like the COVID-19. Our biggest differences come from Pyry’s work with the groups of interest and Jenna’s daily work with the board.

Our work might not be as visible to you as other board members work is. But our tasks give the base to the boards work. The members will benefit from it with ways like that our marketing reaches you, local advocacy work develops and events for members grow. Also, we make sure that every BBA-students voice is heard on the right forums.

Essi Murto & Anna Pentti
advocacy work

We are Anna and Essi and our responsibility area in our Board of the Union is advocacy work. Part of our work can be a little invisible outside because it is mainly about training and supporting our local associations. This way, we want to get you as competent and professional support in your campuses!

One of the biggest projects of this year is more visible outside and you may have seen it all over the social media. A campaign called Haluan Päättää is organized together with The Finnish Union of Engineering students IOL. With this campaign, we want to encourage our members to influence the decision-making of their schools as Representatives.

In addition, we also coordinate influencing communications. Even though we do not only do it together, we are mostly responsible for coordinating it. So, if you are interested in following the topics we have on our desks, we suggest you follow us also on Twitter!

Alma Vänttinen
Tradenologia & events

As an event coordinator, I’m not directly visible to our members as our local associations are usually the ones who make the events possible. I coordinate and help every association with planning and organising the events but specially the one which is responsible for Tradenologia. 

I’m also responsible for Tradenomivappu (The May Day celebrations for The Students of Business and Technology) which is something that’s visible all around Finland during the May Day celebrations. In May Day events we strengthen the communality of the Students of Business and Technology. During the autumn we get to cooperate with the Professionals of Business and Technology and organise the BBA weeks. During those we organise events all around Finland and if you’re our member, they’re usually cheaper or even free of charge.

Liisa Minkkinen & Jere Liitiäinen
members

As responsible for members and member acquisition, our responsibilities are primarily visible to our members through our local associations. Our local associations operate where our members are, which means that we are most useful to our members when we provide quality education and support to our local associations.

A big part of our tasks is member acquisition, so we provide our local associations all the skills, knowledge and other resources they need for member acquisition. Our job is to make sure that the local associations are familiar with the memberships as well as the benefits and services which those include and know how to offer the right membership for a BBA-student. Also opportunities to influence both locally and nationally increase when our local associations recruit members with high quality and actively. In this way we are able to keed the quality of the education of BBA-students high.

Another of our main responsibilities is to maintain the member services of Students of Business and Technology. The benefits of our memberships come to us directly, produced and acquired by Professionals of Business and Technology, so we don’t have to spend time or resources to obtain the benefits. Instead we can spend time on development work and planning the member campaigns.

Of course the member services include work visible to our members. We constantly bring out our interests in our various social media platforms so that our members can find access to services when they feel they are needed. This is how our members get the most out of their membership. In addition, one of our important tasks is to train our loval associations to provide quality member service at the local level. Thanks to this, our local associations are able to obtain comprehensive and high-quality benefits for their members as regionally targeted.

Annika Pihlainen
communications

My job is to take care of our communications and its regularity and continuity. In practice, I am updating and publishing our social media and website, as well as blog posts (this one, too). Also I organize our communications with our board, so it can be fluent and versatile.

As a communications manager, you can mainly see me through our social media and website; most of the things that is published comes through me. I also create a lot of graphics for just basic posts as well as for different campaigns. For example, this year Student to Professional and Haluan Päättää! campaigns' graphics are made by me. It has been nice to be able to use my creativity.

I also plan the communication to be as informative as possible, so that our members stay up to date, e.g. what happens, what membership benefits are good to take advantage of at any time, and what benefits they have at all. I also give information about what our board is doing and where we are going time by time. In social media, I try to keep us actively visible and create clear communication, so that the spirit of what we are doing will be transmitted to the other side of the screen as well.