Improving the Means to Tell Our Stories

Hopefully, you have received an email inviting you to answer our communications survey, so NASBP can assess ways in which to improve our electronic and print communications for the benefit of you and those interested in or impacted by surety bonding. Please tell us what you think of NASBP communications; the survey can be accessed by clicking here. We want your opinions and your ideas; NASBP communications are intended not just to inform, but also to constitute useful informational tools to make your businesses more aware, efficient, and profitable. We are undertaking the survey to garner broader feedback than what we normally receive, but we are delighted to receive feedback at any time and our efforts to improve our communications, substantively and aesthetically, are a constant and ongoing process throughout the year.

Over the last five years, NASBP has pursued a strategy to provide enhanced and additional means to tell the stories of what NASBP is doing for its members and the industry and what surety bonding is doing for countless businesses and the economy. Sometimes, putting that plan in action meant refining or revising existing communication pathways, such as the bimonthly Pipeline or the NASBP website, www.NASBP.org. Other times, new vehicles were conceived and created, such as Focal Point, a seasonal synopsis of state and federal regulatory and legislative developments; the NASBP SmartBrief, our weekly e-newsletter providing timely and on-point news articles from around the world-wide web, which has one of the highest, if not the highest, click through and open rates of any of the 60 or so association SmartBriefs; the Surety Bond Quarterly, a quarterly industry magazine spotlighting topics of interest to the larger surety community and beyond, which is available digitally and in print and has its own web site, www.suretybondquarterly.org; and www.SuretyLearn.org, a website resource for small and emerging contractors to learn the basics about qualifying for surety credit.

We also have dipped our toe in the social media world by establishing our own private online networking system, SuretyConnect, a NASBP LinkedIn group with more than 2350 participants, a Facebook page, and Twitter feeds. Online blogs are produced and placed on the www.NASBP.org homepage with links to such blogs periodically appearing in weekly issues of the NASBP SmartBrief. We are looking at additional ways and additional contributors to increase our blogs and their circulation. And, we plan to build linkages among our various communications to ease readers’ discovery of information about the world of suretyship and to foment ideas among the surety community.

Surety bonding should not be—and cannot be—a mystery in the shadows if we are to thrive in the 21st century. More decision-makers, even our own surety clients, truly need to understand the purpose and the value of surety—how it protects, preserves and enhances our investments in infrastructure and, in turn, our quality of life. Wouldn’t it be nice to speak with a stranger at a social event who asks you what you do for a living and he or she knows what you do when you reply! That, in simple terms, must be our singular communications goal.