First of all, we would like to thank SDA Bocconi for supporting this initiative and hosting this event.

The first day was devoted to analysing the past year’s results: membership evolution, new networks, website features and updates, think tank groups’ news, corporate sponsors and financial results.

We would like to welcome our three new networks launched in Germany in 2008: Berlin, Frankfurt and Dusseldorf. This brings EuropeanPWN to 17 networks all over Europe and more are expected in 2008. The enlargement of our network gives us the opportunity to get directly in touch with more countries and hence more professionals, providing us all with the possibility to network on a European level. Despite different cultures, we all realized that the challenges we are facing are very much the same: from increasing membership so that members have a powerful network and can compare experiences; to the need to have more members actively involved in our activities. The only way to make concrete change is to act.

With Margaret Milan cited as one of the top 10 "women driving change" in Europe; Mirella Visser nominated for European Campaigner of the Year 2007 for her work on promoting women's growth; our BoardMonitor on FT; our membership of over 3.500 across Europe; and the 500+ events we organise every year, EuropeanPWN is recognized as a visible, powerful and influential International network in Europe. Our internationalism is one of our shared values and differentiates us from all the others in Europe. Now that we are becoming a point of reference, the time has come to lead change in business and politics.

The EuropeanPWN online platform has been updated with new features, such as the Business Xchange tool, that enables every member to promote her activity and competencies and provide members with special offers. Online participation, through the forum in particular, is growing and usage of the internal directory that enables you to search within the 17 networks categorically (name, industry, company name, local network, etc), has incredibly increased. This gives me the opportunity to underline once again the importance of creating, feeding and updating your online profile, in order to exploit completely the benefits of this powerful tool.

Think Tank Groups, after their launch 18 months ago, have been effective at surveys, knowledge sharing and tools creation. A new TTG on networking was launched at the beginning of the year and the first outcome expected is a book on how women network, that should be published this autumn. The MATRIX, as this self-coaching tool on “Your first 100 days in your job”, is online now for you all to test it.

We have had an evolution within corporate sponsors, with Deloitte still our platinum sponsor, now together with Orange. We are proud to announce that Sodexò and Coca Cola are now EuropeanPWN corporate sponsors too, together with IBM, Mercer, Mexx, Aon, Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco.

We also had the official presentation of the BoardMonitor 2008 data during a press conference kindly hosted by Egon Zehnder in their wonderful location, who have partnered with EuropeanPWN on this research project since the very beginning in 2004.

As it is a tradition to offer a small gift to the visiting Presidents, we reflected a lot on what we would have liked to have given as a gift and in the end our decision was to offer them a present to people in need. We donated the sum devoted to our Presidents’ gift to Siticibo to support their useful initiative.

The Saturday morning meeting was devoted to sharing best practices. From how to attract corporate sponsors to how to motivate network volunteers, from creating events and activities that appeal to our corporate partners to how to plan and implement a mentoring program. These 4 hours offered all the Presidents a concrete opportunity to learn from other networks experiences, and to share ideas and create new projects and initiatives and, most important of all, create awareness that we are all sharing the same ambitious goals and facing the same challenges.

As PWA Milan the success story I presented was the Coaching Program, that has attracted 48 women up to now, with each single workshop sold out within a couple of days from the launch with long waiting lists, that have convinced us that we should keep offering such opportunities to our members and enlarge the scope of workshops offering some new ones on topics different from coaching.

In conclusion, the EuropeanPWN Annual General Meeting has been a great opportunity to share experiences and best practices with other networks, making us all aware that, despite differences in names, history, network origin and roots, membership size and of course country, we are willing to grow together and to reach great achievements.