ECD Chair’s April 2026 Message

April is PRSA Membership and APR Month

Hiding in Plain Sight: In the Value Search for Our Society, We Find Ourselves

I learned a lot about hidden value while volunteering during our ECD Week of Caring.  Like the hidden value of diapers, for example.  You don’t have to be a parent to know why they are useful. But you might not know that a mom trying to support her family can’t leave her young ones at Daycare and go to work unless she has enough diapers.

That wasn’t the only hidden value revealed that day.  Working alongside fellow PRSA Dayton members, I learned more about them. Their jobs, their lives, importantly, what they need from ECD, and most importantly, the hidden value of what we all get from PRSA.

We all remember the sledgehammer blow of COVID-19 on everything, including the functions of our East Central District Chapters.  We adjusted resolutely and carried on, with virtual meetings, virtual conferences, and virtual award ceremonies. But PRSA membership was already in decline, and the disconnection and disruptions of the pandemic hastened the fall.

I find no fault in the way PRSA fought back by promoting the ROI value of membership, reasoning that webinars, toolkits, and available resources far exceed the ticket price of admission.

“It’s not just dues and money,” former PRSA CEO Linda Thomas Brooks told us at the 2023 in-person ECD QuickStart Conference. “It’s to invest in your career. If you make an investment, you want a return on your investment. We did a member value assessment. How much value are you getting back? With the programs invested in, etc., the average member saw a 3.8 times return. If I was a financial planner, you would give me all your money because that’s a great return!”

For multiple reasons, many PR pros are investing elsewhere or simply not spending at all. A different professional agency might be cheaper. A YouTube video is free.

If career growth was at the top of the value pyramid in Linda’s proposition, lower on the pyramid were the social benefits of networking, trading insights, and enjoying each other’s company at a Happy Hour or Coffee Chat. Linda made this argument too. “Every job I’ve had has come from PRSA members,” she said.  “I met my husband through a PRSA friend. Connections are so wide.”

We may be watching from the upper deck as our Society moves like an ocean liner through tempestuous seas, stiff winds, and emerging icebergs. But we are not abandoning ship because the Society is our home.

That’s why I believe that to tell the success story of PRSA membership, we must invert the value pyramid.  Our top value is community. Our highest value is us. 

PRSA has always been a source of community for the sole practitioner who has no office water cooler to gather around with colleagues. But in the post-COVID era, many agency and corporate PR pros continue to work remotely – a water cooler-free zone – and see others only as digital codes in the worlds of Zoom and Teams. But as a living, breathing community, we can celebrate Chapter awards gatherings and our ECD Conference as a rare opportunity to meet face to face.

Everyone has that same odd déjà vu of seeing someone in person for the first time after having known them only on the computer screen. How did that become normal?

I can’t let a Chair Message go by without mentioning AI, so I will dutifully include the blinking-thinking-alien-robot here. In a world increasingly interested in the value of machines, don’t we need human value more than ever?

As we folded and packaged children’s underwear at the HTC-Dayton family charity, we talked about ways ECD could help Chapters. PRSA Dayton President Niki Mayakova asked about helping with the leadership transition. “Helping manage knowledge better,” said Niki. “Sit down with an ECD representative who will tell you what to expect to do before the year starts. It could be a ‘What to do’ to send out… but a meeting would be nice.”

Here’s to us!

Mark Pompilio

ECD Chair