ANN MARIE WILLIAMS HONORED
BY NAPO-NEW ENGLAND AWARD VOLUNTEER OF THE YEAR

Ann Marie Williams joined NAPO-NE in March of 2003. Not long after joining she took on the Programming Chair and later that same year volunteered for the Organizing U Go event.

“As Programming Chair, she implemented creative programming ideas that increased connections among members. Though I wasn’t very involved in NAPO-NE at the time, it was clear that she took a professional attitude toward her service to NAPO-NE, increasing her participation by bringing her hard-to-find marketing and PR skills to the web and PR committees.”

For the last three years, she has been Chair of PR (partnering with Erika Salloux) as well as taking on Web Chair and a major image redo of our website.  Even though she has stepped down as Web Chair she is continuing with her work to complete the upgrade of our website. This upgrade will improve the functionality of our website by leaps and bounds. It will allow prospects to search for an organizer prospect criteria instead of having to find organizers based on their town location.

During her tenure as PR Chair, she volunteered to work on the Visibility Calendar. For those who don’t know, the Visibility Calendar is a planning tool created to coordinate the focus of our committees around a theme each month allowing for a message with more impact across the board (On the web as well as our PR, Marketing and Programming efforts).

One of the things that makes her stand out is her ability to advocate cutting-edge investments for our chapter’s growth (like outside PR support, something that NAPO National wasn’t even doing at the time) by taking the time to generously educate our membership. While others just talked, she did it. NAPO-NE’s growth over the last two years owes much to Ann Marie’s generosity, spirit, and talent.

With every article – with every radio show – with every television appearance – awareness is raised. A greater understanding of all the areas that we can help our clients creates a growing number of opportunities for us all.  We’ve reached the day when we no longer have to explain what an organizer does.  Our first conversation no longer needs to educate the public on an industry definition of our work, but rather it can start with explaining how we can help them specifically. That day is now, and in no small part because of Ann Marie’s awesome efforts.