The NASPP Blog

Happy New Year! I figure I can get away with saying that for at least a bit longer. In between emerging from holiday celebrations and diving into year-end and tax reporting season, we always like to squeeze in some celebrating here at the NASPP. In what’s becoming my annual celebratory blog, I invite you to share in the congrats. 

Question of the Week Winner!

Kudos to the winner and runners up of our Question of the Week contest. For those of you who are asking “What’s the Question of the Week Contest?“, it’s a weekly quiz challenge designed for stock plan professionals to test their know-how in a variety of areas, while competing against their peers. Hone your equity compensation knowledge while having fun at the same time! There’s a new question each week, and a correct answer earns points.

And the Winners Are…

A big congrats to screen name alias Flower power 121 for coming out on top of our 2014 contest. The screen names of the top 5 scorers are:

• Flower power 121
• mamaandmore
• DMekwunye
• Lucky13
• CEP123

What’s in a Name?

In reviewing the scores from last year’s challenge, I couldn’t help but observe the originality of some of the screen names users are deploying in our contest. It seems nothing was off limits, from the range of “equity” and “stock” possibilities (Bob: Maximum Supreme Commander Equity Department, Got Equity?, cephopeful, StockNewbie, EquiDude) to the patriotic (Starspangled) to impersonators (Piglet, Tigger, Popeye, Truman and Jane Austen) to those who tell it like it is (Don’tKnowNuthin and IthinkUKnow). Of course our sports fans were abundant as well (HokieNation, bbcoachdan, RedsFan, Patriots Fan, NY_Yankee), in addition to a few that would probably require a happy hour and some time to explain (catfiend, Burger Monster, AwesomeSauce, Come on Gus!).

Work Hard, Play Hard

We’ve just reset scores and this week’s challenge starts a whole new contest, so this is the perfect time for NASPP members to sign up, create your screen alias and jump into the Question of the Week Contest. We leave all of January’s questions active for the entire month, so you have plenty of time to complete the first quizzes of the new game.

Equity Expert Podcast

One milestone we’re recognizing is the anniversary of our NASPP podcast series: Equity Expert. That’s right, you can download short episodes right to your computer, smartphone or other device and listen to them at your leisure. This series focuses on short interviews with some of the industry’s best and brightest on a variety of equity compensation topics. Shorter than webcasts, they are designed to give you the quick run down on details you need to know. We’ve posted 12 episodes so far, and hope to double that to 24 more in 2015! Be sure to subscribe in order to get updates on new episodes.

Social Status

Last year when I wrote this early January blog, we were celebrating our 400th LinkedIn follower. At the time of this blog, we’ve passed the 900 follower mark – more than double the number we had just a year ago! We’ve got lots of great content posted to our social media pages, so be sure to like/follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter!

New Year’s Resolutions

Let’s face it – lots of us make them and many of us break them. I’m the first to admit I’m not the best at following through on keeping my New Year’s resolutions. One thing I’ve learned is that those who publicly declare their resolutions are more likely to keep them (peer pressure maybe?). In case you missed it, the NASPP has already captured the resolutions of some of our members – check them out and be sure to add your own in the comments! Our Executive Director, Barbara Baksa, hopes to include a cat video in every presentation she prepares this year (I’m looking forward to seeing that happen). I’ll publicly put two of mine out there – on the personal side I intend to walk a cumulative 500 miles this year in an effort to maintain my health. On the NASPP side, we are going to post at least 24 new podcast episodes to our series this year, so be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out. And, in trying to motivate us all to stay true to our goals for 2015, I will post intermittent progress reports

I think that’s enough celebrating for now – time to get back to work (in my case, working on those 24 podcast episodes!). I wish all of you an incredible year.

-Jenn