Connecting Our Waters attended the 39th Annual Meeting of the Midwest Aquatic Plant Management Society (MAPMS). Watershed Coordinator, Emily Henrigillis, gave a talk on building organizational capacity through social media. While a different topic than most the talks at the conference, there was a great turnout for the presentation.
Emily focused on a lot of the things she has learned through her experiences at Fox-Wolf as well as with the Women of Aquatics and Fox Cities Roller Derby. Great questions were asked about how to gain attendance at events even with the use of social media. This issue is one of the most complicated because you can write posts, create events, and share the heck out of it and people will still not show up. Emily suggested more face to face time when things like this happen. It seems that once people have learned and gotten to know the faces in an organization, the more likely they will show up for events.
The rest of the conference talks were focused on managing invasive milfoils, starry stonewort, and nuisance algae blooms. There were also talks on case studies using aeration and hand-harvesting techniques. Using aeration to help with algae blooms was another hot topic during the conference. Most of the talks were applicable to the Connecting Our Waters project area and we are hoping to share some of the knowledge from the conference.
The Palmer House Hotel was an incredible venue for the conference. Located in the heart of downtown Chicago, it was fun to get out and see the sites during conference breaks. It was also great to see so many familiar faces as well as network with new contacts. We hope to collaborate with new partners as the summer goes on to spread the knowledge of AIS management.
For more information about Connecting Our Waters contact Emily Henrigillis at emily@fwwa.org or 920.851.6472
