Inaugural Blog Post

March 3, 2009

Colorado Springs, CO

Dear Friends of NCHERM,

As of this writing, the NCHERM website (www.ncherm.org) has received 46,765 unique visitors since our launch nine years ago in January of 2000. While this may be many or few, depending on your perspective, 4,100 of those visitors have knocked on the NCHERM door (portal, I guess) in just the last six weeks. This is a rather startling spike in our web traffic.

The NCHERM website is, of course, our main means of staying connected with those of you who are our fellow travelers in this field. We may visit a campus a day, and connect with you more directly and viscerally during those visits, but in between, NCHERM.org is our way of maintaining, growing and nurturing the relationships we have with you that empower us to be positive influences on our field. At a time when the economy has made our visits to your campuses less frequent, and our ability to connect at conferences is impeded as well, it makes sense that traffic to the website would increase.

Because we value our dialogues with you, and want the website to be for you an increasingly valuable resource, we have decided to initiate a weekly blog. It will give you a regular reason to visit the NCHERM homepage and to connect with us, in a spirit of shared learning and exchange. We may post more often, too, when there are interesting things to report or reflect upon.

What can you expect? A post each week from Scott or Saunie or me. We'll identify who's writing each week, and you can expect an occasional guest blog, too. What will our topics be? A report of an interesting campus visit. Something learned at a conference. A frustration with a needed change that is coming too slowly. A new case that should be on your radar. A soapbox about an issue or topic that needs our attention. A best practice we have identified. A valuable upcoming event. Etc.

We'll try to keep the posts short and sweet, and we'll make sure the content is engaging enough to keep you coming back.

Welcome to the NCHERM Risk MaBlog. Happy reading.

Brett