Monday, June 15, 2009

Membership News

Commanders:

If you’ll look at the attached graphs you’ll see a disturbing trend. Membership losses, which have run at nearly 6% per year for the last few years are suddenly over 8% in 2009. What’s going on here? Our losses due to non-renewals are running about the same as previous years. What’s causing the problem is that were not recruiting new members as successfully this year as in the past. The number of new members recruited this year is 968 members fewer than recruited the year before (2,816 vs. 3,784). Since those lost recruiting opportunities are history, it seems to me that we need to redouble our retention efforts. At this point you should be able to clearly identify those members who have not yet renewed in May which is our largest renewal month. Please put together a committee to personally call each of those members who’ve not yet renewed and make sure they know how important their membership is to your squadron and ask them to renew their membership. The sooner you do this, the more successful you’ll be.

This past weekend the Board authorized a plan that will provide new members a free copy of the USPS cookbook “By Land or By Sea”, which includes shipping, as an incentive to join USPS. Each new membership application will be eligible, with a limit of one per household. This offer will be in effect until the current inventory (969 copies) is depleted.

Thanks for all you do for USPS.

John Alter
National Administrative Officer



Click on graph to enlarge


Click on graph to enlarge