Encompass head on wooing Interex members

24.01.2006
Chicago-based Encompass, a Hewlett-Packard Co. user group, has been trying to boost its membership by adding former Interex members in the wake of that group's demise last year. But so far, only about 150 former Interex members -- out of an estimated 100,000 -- have taken advantage of a free membership offer. Interex closed last year after 30 years when HP canceled the Interex-backed HP World 2005. Kristi Browder, president of Encompass and IT director at Silicon Laboratories Inc. in Austin, spoke with Computerworld about Encompass' future and the HP Technology Forum slated for Houston in September.

How has the demise of Interex affected your membership? Our community is at 10,000 [members]. We'd like to increase membership over this next year. Primarily, the way we're hoping to address that is to embrace the former Interex members and the partners involved with the Interex community -- the other HP user group. We've already started that. We have a letter going out [today]. The mailing list for the membership of Interex was purchased by HP, and so they're actually going to do a mailing for us with an opt-in to become an Encompass member. We've extended the free membership to any former Interex members to March 2006.

We have been growing our local presence within the local user groups. We're continuing to get some local user groups started up. One other way we'll do this is being in contact with previous local Interex user groups.

Have you already seen a boost in membership from former Interex members? Yes, we have. A ballpark 150 members have joined to date. We plan to grow our membership by 25%. We are continuing our outreach efforts to the Interex community and have extended the free membership opportunity to March 31. In addition, Encompass is working closely with the HP Certified Professional Program and has extended membership and community offers to that group as well.

Are you finding that former Interex members are a bit jaded about what HP did? Not the ones I'm dealing with. I could understand it. We've all gone through times where we've gone through disappointments, especially in a volunteer position. I can't say we're immune to it either. Encompass has had its moments. So far it's been a warm welcome for us, and they seem to be embracing it.

You also had to deal with the HP Technology Forum being postponed and then moved as a result of last fall's hurricanes. What are your plans this year? The Technology Forum is going to be held in Houston, Texas, during hurricane season -- Sept. 17-22. We expect to see double the attendance at that one. We had roughly 4,000 people at the Orlando event, which we were grateful for, considering that event had moved.