The Eye Bank Association of America (EBAA) has always strived to provide members with educational opportunities and resources that make it easier for them to do their jobs. However, in 2020, like other associations, COVID-19 caused us to pivot and find ways to assist our members: both non-profit eye banks with dedicated staff, as well as corneal surgeons. Here’s a look at some of the steps we took.

Community Chats

Soon after the pandemic began, we launched Community Chats to provide members the opportunity to regularly meet and discuss best practices, solutions, concerns, ideas, and more. Naturally, many of these early conversations revolved around the challenges related to navigating COVID-19. Although this offering began as a way to keep members connected, it is something that we have continued for the past two years. While the focus of conversation has largely drifted away from the pandemic, we continue to find other topics to discuss, such as communications and marketing, quality assurance, technical, or administration. One reason we feel these chats have been so successful is because members are seeing and talking to each other continuously throughout the year, compared to the one or two times they would see each other at a conference.

Learning Management System

At the end of 2018, we launched our learning management system, eyeLEARN. During the early stages, the LMS was primarily used for previously recorded and live webinars. While we always wanted eyeLEARN to be something more robust, COVID-19 caused us to speed up the process of expanding our resources. Since we transitioned to virtual meetings for our larger conferences during the pandemic, eyeLEARN became the place to host our live virtual events. Additionally, our committees have worked hard to create customizable and downloadable resources for members, and we are at the beginning phase of launching a training library that will feature bite-sized videos on a variety of topics.

We offer our members a place to engage in discussions, search for previously posted questions, and chat with their peers.

Free Sessions and Discounted Pricing

During the first few months of the pandemic, our members were especially affected because elective surgeries had been canceled. Since corneal surgeons weren’t performing transplants, the eye banks did not need to recover corneal tissue. This meant that our members had an unprecedented amount of time on their hands, with potentially not much money to work with.

To help with this issue, EBAA made a number of our “from the vault” on-demand sessions available for free for a limited time. We also hosted a free live session about self-care with an expert speaker to help members navigate their feelings. Additionally, we heavily discounted the webinars and virtual meetings we were charging for to make them more accessible to more people, and discounted group passes were offered for our virtual meeting, which allowed more members than ever to attend.

Online Community Platform

To move away from antiquated email chain listservs, we created an online community, the Lens, that allows members to post questions in topic-focused groups. Similar to ASAE’s members-only Collaborate platform, we offer our members a place to engage in discussions, search for previously posted questions, and chat with their peers.

New Association Management System

In 2021, we migrated to a new association management system. Our previous AMS was just not cutting it anymore – it didn’t have all of the capabilities we needed or wanted. With our new AMS, there’s a much cleaner member portal, and it gives more power to our members to manage their data.

While developing the LMS and online community, as well as transitioning to our new AMS, required an investment of time and money, these were all things that really needed to be done to move our association forward.

We found vendors who worked within our budget and met our needs. Even if there is no room in the budget for any platform upgrades, there are still various ways to enhance the member experience by utilizing things like the community chats, previously recorded sessions, or customizable resources. We all want to serve our members the best we can—sometimes that means taking a hard look at your current processes and finding new paths to success.