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media presence through paid advertising or targeted promotions.
Our separate Facebook pages for
The Foreign Service Journal
and
Inside a U.S. Embassy
are also doing well, and we continue to use
them to engage with a defined audience. By the end of the year,
member subscriptions for the “Daily Media Digest” topped 1,400.
If you are an AFSA member and are not yet receiving the digest
but want to, send a message to
mediadigest@afsa.org, and we’ll
add you to the list!
The AFSA website
(www.afsa.org)remains
our best online outreach
tool. In 2014, more unique
visitors than ever before
used the site; since the
current site launched in
2011, the number of users
has grown by 67 percent.
The number of visitors
to the
FSJ
section of the
AFSA website grew by a
whopping 189 percent
after
FSJ
articles became
available online in a more
user-friendly format in
November 2013. The sec-
tion of the site where we
track ambassadorial ap-
pointments also jumped
by more than 100 percent
from 2013, mostly thanks
to AFSA’s increasingly vis-
ible advocacy on the issue.
The most popular sec-
tions of the website in 2014 were the national high school essay
contest, the ambassador tracker, Foreign Service blogs,
The For-
eign Service Journal
and AFSA scholarships.
In the last quarter of 2014, the communications team under-
took the ambitious task of refreshing the website—the first major
update since 2011. Although the process of cleaning up an inven-
tory of more than 600 pages on the site has been time-consuming,
we expect the result to be faster loading times, easier-to-find in-
formation and an improved user experience overall.
In 2015, we look forward to bringing a newly reorganized web-
site to our members, with even more functionality for streamlined
ways to join AFSA, renew membership, make donations, update
member profiles, purchase items such as the Foreign Service com-
memorative coin and engage with colleagues.
l
Labor Management:
Looking Out For Members
A
FSA’s 2014 survey showed that members greatly value the in-
dividual services provided by the labor management (LM)
office. This is true even for those members who have never re-
quested assistance from our staff of five attorneys, three labor
management specialists and two administrative support persons.
We know, in fact, that many members view the Labor Manage-
ment services as an insurance policy—we are there if you need
us, although you hope you never will. In 2014, LM implemented a
Client Types
Foreign Service
Specialists
214 / 50.71%
Other (Associates/
Spouses/Retirees)
22 / 5.21%
Foreign Service
Officers
186 / 44.08%
Labor Management Staff:
(from left)
Front Row:
USAID Staff
Assistant Chioma Dike, Senior Staff Attorney Neera Parikh,
Executive Assistant and Office Manager Lindsey Botts, General
Counsel Sharon Papp, Staff Attorney Raeka Safai.
Back Row:
Senior LM Advisor James Yorke, LM Counselor Colleen Fallon-
Lenaghan, Staff Attorney Andrew Large, Deputy General Counsel
Zlatana Badrich, USAID Senior LM Advisor Douglas Broome, LM
Assistant Jason Snyder.
Filmmaker Orwa Nyrabia discusses
his documentary “Return to Homs”
at AFSA in April 2014.