How to avoid delays with a renewal of your RUSA membership

[Rob Hawks]

Hi all RUSA members, 

This is of import to those about to renew their membership with RUSA.

Any time the contact or other related information is changed on a renewing membership, that submission goes into a queue for the RUSA membership team to review. That team reviews the submission largely to look for typos, or even omissions compared to the previous membership data. The renewal only becomes complete after the manual review by the membership team.

A great many of the renewals that are flagged for review are because of changes to mailing addresses. If those data points have truly changed it is a simple matter to process the renewal. However, a great many of the 'changes' to mailing are only due to punctuation or capitalization changes. An example of that would be like the following:

123 Maple St.

is changed to

123 Maple Street or to 123 Maple st or to 123 Maple St (note the missing period)

(The same is true for email addresses. Those get put in the review queue even when punctuation or capitalization changes are the only differences)

When you are renewing, the form will present your address section like this:

Street Address*	private

Unless you know your address has changed since your last renewal/join date, if you leave the Xs alone the previous address will be used and you don't have to worry about entering it in again exactly as it was before, and you'd avoid a delay in processing. If there are no edits to member data, as long as you pay by paypal, a renewal will almost always happen automatically.

About processing time for renewals with changes, at the  beginning of the process it is stated you need to allow up to 48 hours for the membership team to process submissions. While some member of the team will usually check on things daily, we are all volunteers and *all* of us still ride our bikes, take vacations, etc., so it is best to keep in mind the 48 hour turnaround time.

thanks

rob hawks

for the RUSA membership team