A guest blog post by kuro

December 28, 2023

3 min read

Stempra hosted its second AGM online and we were pleased to see so many members attend.
Thank you to everyone who joined us this year. When we promised you all at last year’s virtual AGM
that we’d host a party soon, we could not have imagined that we would still be waiting to fulfil that
promise. But we are all very much looking forward to an in-person Stempra event soon.

Stempra’s chair Rob Dawson kicked off the meeting with an update on what the committee has
achieved over the past year. Like many organisations, Stempra has had to make changes to how we
work over the last year, switching to operating fully online.

Because of this, we’ve had record attendance at the Press Officer Training Day, and our online events on preprints, misinformation and pitching drew bigger crowds than we have had for our in-person event. We will be looking at ways to continue to ensure our events are as accessible as possible to everyone in the future, even when in-person events are permitted again.

We know the last year hasn’t been easy and there have been big changes in our sector. Stempra has
tried to support its members by arranging for senior communications people to be on hand to offer
support with CVs and interviews and we have free membership still available for anyone facing
hardship.

We also relaunched the Stempra buddy scheme to help people find mentors and mentees.
Stempra also launched a ‘preprint checklist’ following lots of discussion this year about publicising
pre-prints during Covid which highlights some important considerations to take into account before
deciding to publicise a preprint.

We also have plans to invest in the Stempra website to provide a better process for members. We
want to create a membership login area of the site and better video resources from our events.
And finally for some updates on committee members.

The current Stempra treasurer, Daisy Barton, is on maternity leave from March 2021 and committee
member Hannah Taylor-Lewis has kindly agreed to act as Treasurer until Daisy returns at the end of
the year.

Sadly, this year we say goodbye to our events coordinator Emily Head and our social media co-
ordinator Erin Johnson. They have both played a really important role in the committee over the last
few years but we are sure they will continue to be involved in Stempra’s activities.

And finally, we are looking forward to welcoming our two new committee members Angharad
Kolator-Baldwin and Jessica Davenport to the committee.