In the past few years, I have noticed that it is easy for me to miss paying my membership dues for the various amateur radio clubs I’ve joined. Despite the trend towards electronic mail, there is a huge pile of paper mail that ends up on our kitchen table. Somewhere in there is a little postcard or letter reminding me to pay my dues. It often gets swept into the junk mail pile and into the trash can. Worse yet, many clubs just put out the blanket message that “all dues are due” in the club newsletter or an email message.
I did a little inventory last night of my membership status with the various clubs and sure enough, I am delinquent with several of them. Some of these organizations are repeater groups that only meet once per year, so there is no natural reminder built in. It is interesting that none of the clubs have followed up with me and asked “did you really intend to drop your membership?” Many clubs are seeing a flat to declining roster due to the demographics of the ham community, so you’d think they would focus on retention.
Based on my experience, I reached these conclusions:
- With some clubs struggling, I will pay more attention to this renewal issue so that I am supporting the local ham community.
- Even though I operate my own UHF repeater and tend to hang out there, I’ve decided to increase my support to several of the local repeater groups. I’ve focused on the ones that actively support ARES and RACES activities, an important part of the amateur radio service.
- Radio clubs can really benefit from monitoring their rosters and being a little more assertive on retaining members. I bet they could bump their rolls by 10 to 20% with just a little follow up.
What do you think?
73, Bob K0NR
“Radio clubs can really benefit from monitoring their rosters and being a little more assertive on retaining members. I bet they could bump their rolls by 10 to 20% with just a little follow up.”
I went through this exercise at our club last year. Here are the results we had:
Life changes/no time for club: 5
Joined a geographically closer club: 3
Became Inactive: 1
Never responded: 4
Otherwise uncontactable: 2
Forgot to send dues in and sent them in: 1
No particular point here, just data from my experience….
73
Not only are we “too busy” but it seems that the local clubs can be “too disorganized”. My local club streamlined things a few years ago by forcing all dues to be due in September. This avoided some collection hassles at the monthly meetings as the treasurer tried to hunt down the two or three who had expired memberships for that particular month. Now, everyone is due in September.
However, not everyone makes the September meeting (I was away on business last time). That means that there are still a few to be hunted down – and that’s no longer a priority. So, guys like me (who miss many meetings) fall through the cracks. At this month’s meeting, I came prepared to get caught up… but as we were doing our annual tornado/storm spotter school the guy didn’t have his book. “Get me next time.”
I suppose some clubs are high tech by now… e-newsletters with auto-reminders to pay via PayPal. Not us in Zero-land though.
73
Pat N0HR
http://www.n0hr.com
K3NG,
Roughly how many members in the club?
Bob K0NR
Hi Bob,
The number of card-carrying members hovers around 30 or 35. I should add a caveat that the numbers above involved members who were members in the previous two years and hadn’t paid for current year and the actual data set of unique members for the entire three year period was about 48. (I hope that makes sense)
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