URMIA Matters

Episode 1: Welcome

November 12, 2019 URMIA Season 1 Episode 1
URMIA Matters
Episode 1: Welcome
Show Notes Transcript

Jenny Whittington, executive director of the University Risk Management & Insurance Association (URMIA), talks about the association’s purpose and provides insights into why URMIA launched the URMIA Matters podcast series as a new educational channel about higher education risk management for the association's members and the public.

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Thanks for listening to URMIA Matters!

Jenny: Hi everyone, this is Jenny Whittington, executive director of URMIA.And I am here to launch our new Podcast Series, called URMIA Matters. Today is kind of a special day for kicking things off and I have our producer here Jeremy Shere and he is actually going to interview me today and talk about the goals of the podcast.
 
 Jeremy: Yes, thank you very much. Well first, how are you well 

 

Jenny: I’m swell, just swell. 
 
 

Jeremy: Are you excited about doing this first episode?
 
 Jenny: Excited isn’t exactly the word that I told Michelle this morning but nervous was a bit of the feelings I had but I am excited. This is a long time coming and we wanted to do a podcast for a long time so I’m thrilled we’re here. 
 
 Jeremy: So let’s start there. Why are you doing this podcast?

 

Jenny: So for a few years the board of directors from URMIA, our governance body, has been talking about doing a podcast and I will say that, you know, we have baby boomers on our board we have younger generation folks on the board and the idea did come from the younger folks and it's taken a little bit of time to percolate but it was written in our strategic plan. It came up through a comprehensive needs assessment that the association did in 2018 as a way to reach our members. 

 

Our members have less time than they ever have and we need to find different channels to reach different pockets of our market.

 

Jeremy: Okay great, so it sounds like there is some real interest from the board on doing a podcast and that your members are ready for something like that so what do you think you'll be able to do in a podcast that you haven't been doing so far on your other kinds of communications?

 

Jenny; I think the #1 thing to me personally, is just that it's so easy and our members can can get to it 24/7 from their device, from their computer. I'm fairly new to the podcast world myself I mean only the last few months that I really subscribed and kind of understand it. I walk my dog almost every morning so I look for about 20 minutes segments because that's about the amount of time that I have and I just I find it really interesting to subscribe to different ones and learn in different ways and I think our members will find the same way but we all have 20 minutes here or there throughout the day but we often don't have 45 minutes or 90 minutes to sit down and watch a visual so I think the way that you can take it on the road, you can watch it wherever you want it, whenever you want it - when you have 20 minutes. 
 
 Jeremy: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. The convenience of it, right? It's so convenient. And something I really like about podcasts is just hearing directly from people having real conversations, just like we're doing right now.

 

Jenny: Absolutely, I mean I've been with URMIA going on fifteen years now and we have a strong sense of community and I think this will really enable our members to even stay more connected to each other, to new people, and understand a different part about people. It’s a different delivery method but I think it'll be a great way to get to know our current leadership team. They will be guest hosts from time to time and hear about what URMIA is doing but also really focus on subject matter. We really want this to be a way to get out higher education risk management topics.

 

Jeremy: So the podcast is going to come out twice a month and what are some of those topics that we’ll be discussing?
 
 Jenny: Well, it’s going to be everything, it will probably very comprehensive over time. We're going to start with a topic that's the top of mind right now, the hardening Insurance market and strategies with how to deal with that. Our members are all across the board. We have new people to higher education risk management. We have people who have been around for a long time. Some of our members haven’t ever experienced this market. There are different tools that you need in your toolbox. So that's going to be one of the first topics.
 
 We also going to share some of the hot topics on our community. Things that Lou Drapeau, our resource manager will talk about. Things that are just going on in the higher education marketplace right now. That might be a continuous thing because those are always changing week-by-week we have different topics that come up in the community and then we will just pick risk management topics and go through them one-by-one. I think we have a list of, I don't know, 500 risks that we can go through. So we have a lot of topics.
 
 Jeremy: Wow, a lot of risks. A lotta risks to discuss. Okay, well, personally I'm thrilled to be doing this with you guys, I think it's going to be a lot of fun. So thank you. 

 

Jenny:  Well, thank you! We are really looking forward to it.   Thanks to all those out there that are listening and a special thanks to Michelle Smith for making this all happen.

 

So thanks everybody for listening today we look forward to bringing to you again soon. Stay tuned for more and look for us anywhere podcast can be found.
 
 Jeremy: The URMIA matters podcast is brought to you by the University Risk Management and Insurance Association. You can find and subscribe to the podcast on any podcast app and while you're we’d appreciate if you’d give us 5-star review. and be sure to visit URMIA.org that’s u-r-m-i-a dot org to check out our wealth of online resources. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.