Comments on: 21% of Intermountain Chapter Members Planning to Renew STC Membership

By: Paul

Paul — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 22:32:50 +0000

Now several months later, we see that our membership renewals were pretty close to the survey results. We currently have 23 members of the local chapter for 2010. I understand we had 80 last year. That puts our renewal rate somewhere between 25% and 30%. That means we lost between 70-75% of our members….in a single year.

I’ll be interested to see if this happens on a national level, or if it is just the perils of being a small chapter that brought about such dramatic decline in our chapter membership.

By: Craig

Craig — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:17:30 +0000

I’m probably going to try the IEEE. It offers a Professional Communications Society in which I’m interested. If the IEEE doesn’t hold my attention, then I will probably return to the STC.

By: 2010 – renewing membership in STC and the SIG | STC AccessAbility SIG

2010 – renewing membership in STC and the SIG | STC AccessAbility SIG — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:32:34 +0000

[...] and http://stcrmc.org/wordpress/?p=42. STC Rocky Mountain chapter member Tom Johnson posted the results of a renewal survey on his [...]

By: Bob Kauten

Bob Kauten — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:07:18 +0000

Thanks for publishing this, Tom. These survey results are exactly what STC HQ needs to see and understand.
All of my benefit as an STC member comes from membership in the local chapter. There’s no reason whatever to belong to the national organization, but the nonprofit regulations prevent autonomy of the local chapters.
At least two members of my chapter’s Admin Council will not be renewing. That includes me. I’m unemployed.
The situation, in short:
No real attempt to produce the a la carte dues structure.
No pass-through of chapter fees to the chapters.
No brainer.
I’ll link to this article from my blog. Thanks again.
Bob Kauten

By: Paul Pehrson

Paul Pehrson — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:02:56 +0000

One question that wasn’t asked in the survey is this: will you renew your membership IN THE CHAPTER?

In 2010, members will have to renew at the national level, and will have to fork over additional funds to join a chapter (and in 2010, the chapter will receive NONE of those funds, which blows my mind: how can they charge you to join a chapter, but provide none of the funds to the chapter to conduct business or provide value for the membership?).

So even if 2/3 renew (which I think is overly optomistic), how many of those will join the local chapter at an additional cost?

By: Tricia

Tricia — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:06:48 +0000

As a recent graduate and a new technical writer, I was looking forward to joining STC, but it would have been a stretch on my budget before, and now with the dues increase it is out of the question. It is definitely a disappointment for me!

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:54:24 +0000

This has been discussed at length on the STC presidents’ listserv, as have other comparisons between STC and ASTD. According to this discussion, there are problems with going to this approach given STC’s particular non-profit org status (there are multiple statuses with the IRS for non-profit orgs). But I’m not saying that it couldn’t be done.

Regarding what Joe said: 60% of the chapter responded to this point. I think that a likely scenario is that the undecided group would probably divide about the same as the other two groups, so we’d end up with about a third of the respondents renewing and two-thirds not. So one-third of 46 people is 15 people renewing. If the other 31 people fall along the same lines, we end up with only 25 members renewing.

No matter the number of things that STC puts forward as benefits (the things we should be advertising to potential members to get them to join), the fact that two-thirds of a chapter finds $215 to $350 not worth the return is problematic to say the least, making it hard to justify it to potential members. If I have a hard time personally justifying it, how do I market it to someone else convincingly, even if I do renew?

By: Leslie

Leslie — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:21:44 +0000

The response to this survey doesn’t surprise me at all.

Our department has six writers, five of whom had STC memberships last year. The company pays for the memberships but none of us are keen to renew this year because we can think of so many better ways to spend our training budget.

Our Team Leader insists on having one STC member in the department so that we get the Intercom and emails announcing webinars. No one has volunteered yet, so it looks like we’ll have to draw straws.

Hard to believe, but true.

By: Marj Hermansen-Eldard

Marj Hermansen-Eldard — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:44:32 +0000

Mary, would that STC had considered this option. Instead, they are actually charging us more to belong to a local community…something I find beyond ridiculous.

By: Mary Connor

Mary Connor — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:03:21 +0000

One option is to do what ASTD does: Let people join chapter-only for a fraction of the cost, which keeps them involved with the organization and active at the local level (which is where practitioners derive most of their benefit).

I don’t see too much financial conflict in this: folks who need conference discounts and peer-reviewed journals will stay national, but folks who wouldn’t renew at all otherwise could stay active members in their metros.