Renewing or Joining RUSA: some details that explain what happens

[Rob Hawks]

Hi all,

Any brand new membership submission, and any renewal that changes any contact or name information is reviewed by hand and can sometimes take over a day to process, depending on when the Membership Team last cleared out the queue and when you submit your membership form.

The membership team uses this approach to spot any errors to ensure that contact information is viable. For example, we've seen email addresses submitted as @gmail.net, @gmail.con, etc. We've also spotted renewals where the street address changes from something like 123 Maple St., Apt 24, to 123 Maple Street.

A renewal that includes a change in contact info goes into our queue for review, but a renewal that does not change any contact or other info is processed straight away. Note that the software to detect a change is doing a full string match. That means that changing your address from 123 Maple Street to 123 Maple St. will flag it as a change.

Another point to keep in mind is that if you are in any kind of hurry to get your renewal or new membership processed, please don't pay by check. You don't need a Paypal account to pay by credit card. For payment by check, we wait until the check is in hand so that can sometimes take 4 to 10 days!

If you submit a renewal or a new membership, and then check on line for changes right away, please don't submit a new renewal or new membership. Please give us the time stated on the form to process that. Normally (save for vacations or, oh my, riding our bike!) a member of the Membership team checks outstanding submissions every day sometimes more than once a day! If you need to sign up for a perm or a brevet, please give us more than one day to process so that, for example, your RBA can check your membershp status on the website.

One last thing. Joining RUSA does *not* automatically create a *website account*. Those accounts are created by you. If you yourself have not created that website account, asking for a password reset won't work. Best first step if you try to log in to that account and can't get in is to use this link: https://rusa.org/user/register    You'll either get a new account created (because none existed for your email address of record) or the system will tell you the account already exists at which point you can request a password change if you've forgotten that.

All this information should help you save a little time and consternation, and it will save the membership team time by reducing duplications, etc.

Thanks for being a RUSA member!

rob hawks

for the RUSA membership team