President’s Report – September 2024

Congress, Athens, 2024

Congress was an amazing success. With more than 1000 attendees from 78 countries, the papers, the exhibitions, the discussions, but most of all the vibe, were amazing. The next Congress will be in Prague, Czechia, 28 September to 1 October.

The Changes to the Statutes

The General Meeting at Congress voted to adopt the final set of changes to the ESOMAR Statutes. This completes the current round of reviews that started two years ago and finishes the work of Tom De Ruyck and the Governance Review Group.

The elections for the next Council and President will be held early next year their term will be for three years, instead of the previous two years. As President I would like to thank Tom and the Governance Review Group, especially Mario Van Hamersveld, for two-years of hard work and for helping put ESOMAR on a much better governance footing.

The Membership Fee for 2025

Under ESOMAR Statutes, the Council needs to put the membership fee to the vote each year. This year the increase in expenditure needed in 2025 to deliver ESOMAR’s services was 305K Euros. We felt that 119K could be met by savings that did not impact services and by additional revenue. This meant that we needed 186K and we proposed to fund this by a membership fee increase of 5%.

At the General Meeting the proposed fee increase was defeated by 59% to 41%.

The Council has reviewed the situation, and have decided:

• The 2025 Membership Fee will be the same as the 2024 Membership Fee.

• The Council will review the level of spending, additional sources of revenue, and financing options in preparing the 2025 budget for ESOMAR.

• The ESOMAR budget for 2025 (based on a zero fee increase) will be put to members for a vote (in line with the amended Statutes), probably in December.

The ICC/ESOMAR Code

One of the main ESOMAR projects in 2024 and in 2025 relates to the ICC/ESOMAR Code. This code is perhaps the single best example of why the international insights ecosystem needs ESOMAR. The code is backed by the International Chamber of Commerce and ESOMAR. This joint approach gives the Code the ability to be used globally, to indicate best practice and to promote self-regulation. The Code needs to be updated (think of all the changes that technology, especially AI is bringing). The update requires a team of experts led by the Chair of the Professional Standards Committee Judith Passingham.

We expect the new code to be published in 2025.

The IT Review

ESOMAR’s IT is in urgent need of attention. We have a range of different applications that do not work well together, they are difficult and inefficient to use, and they provide a poor user experience to members and to people buying services from ESOMAR. The Council commissioned an IT review, and this has confirmed the problems with IT and we are now going to look at options for how to get our IT to better serve the interests of members. The three priorities for the review are:

1. The member experience

2. The experience for staff using the IT

3. The ability to raise revenue

The Council have now requested specific plans to improving the IT and it is our intention that the user experience will be markedly better by April next year.

ISO 2025

For ESOMAR staff and Council the Congress runs from the Friday evening before Congress, over the weekend and through till Wednesday afternoon. However, for the Director General, two members of the Government Affairs and Professional Standards team, and two members of Council (Alina Serbanica and Dharmendra Jain) it last for two more days as they met with standards experts from around the world for two days as part of the ISO 20252 working group, which was hosted by ESOMAR.