Membership Requirements

[thugsb]

Please post your suggestions regarding membership requirements here. Please number them, for easy reference.

[thugsb]

Suggestion #1:

I suggest the following requirements:

• Attend two planning meetings in the past year.
• If a person is unable to attend planning meetings for a legitimate reason, a combination of an executive and campaign manager can vouch for a person, thereby waiving the attendance requirement.
• $25 annual membership fee, reduced to $5 for students and low-income (as decided by the individual).

In return, members receive the ability to vote in formal meetings, and may receive a t-shirt once they have paid their membership fee, if they desire one (subject to availability).

[Milan]

While we do record attendance at all meetings, it seems fairly laborious to have to check whether each person has attended two meetings in the last year.

As an alternative, perhaps we could say that you need to attend two meetings before you can pay for an annual membership.

Do we want to have some requirement for active participation? Perhaps memberships should be suspended if someone fails to attend an event or planning meeting every six months...

[Monica Resendes]

I have a question for clarification and a suggestion.

Question - as campaigns ramp up, members might be meeting often to work on them during the week, but not necc show up on Tuesday for planning meetings. Does going to other campaign-specific meetings count as "attending two meetings"? Or, do they have to be Tuesday night meetings, since these often deal with issues at large for the whole group?

Suggestion #2 - I'm thinking of ways to be able to tell whether members have been active over periods of 6 or 12 months. One idea is that we might send out a twice yearly survey for members to fill out that can give us important feedback on their activities, thoughts and ideas. Given that we don't record attendance at all meetings as Milan pointed out, it might be a way to help track engagement (or lack thereof), remind members that paid membership requires active participation, and get useful feedback. 

[thugsb]

To answer Monica's question - I think the campaign meetings do count, which is why the campaign manager can vouch for them. Maybe that needs to be explicitly stated that "planning meetings include campaign planning meetings"? However, it seems that campaign meetings are not posting their minutes publicly, so we don't have a record. Maybe we should require that campaign planning meeting minutes get posted?

In terms of your suggestion Monica, would the survey be the only requirement, or is it an add-on requirement to the 3 requirements I suggested?

I do like Milan's suggestion of only allowing payment after they've attended two meetings. Would that effectively mean that people get 1 meeting "free", and then have to pay at their second meeting (but they get a t-shirt for doing so, so it's really not that bad).

Having a 6-month period for tracking active membership would require tracking of that. If we're wanting to keep tracking to a minimum, that suggestion takes us in the other direction. Maybe Monica's suggestion of a survey requirement would be better?

[Milan]

Summing up, one approach might be:

1) You are eligible to become a member after you attend any two meetings (either weekly planning meetings or campaign planning meetings). I think we can use the honour system for this.

2) Becoming a member requires paying a small annual fee, with a reduced option for (self-identified) students and those on low incomes

3) Annually, when a person's membership is expiring, we will set up NationBuilder to automatically send them a very short survey. It could ask how they have been involved in the group, any suggestions they have, etc.

That way, we don't need to track who attends meetings, for the most part. The payment suggests a certain degree of seriousness, and we could get feedback about how active people are and why/why not.

[Milan]

I am increasingly of the view that having an annual membership fee may not be the best approach. Our organization runs on volunteers, above all, and there is a general idea that a person's level of involvement in the organization is the most important thing. Many of us have donated so many hours of our time that it seems ungrateful and a bit silly to also ask for $25 or $5 per year.

I don't think we are especially wanting for money, or that having an annual membership fee would raise a worthwhile amount of it.

Perhaps we should set the requirements as:

1) You are eligible to become a member after you attend any two meetings (either weekly planning meetings or campaign planning meetings). I think we can use the honour system for this.

2) In order to remain a member, you will be asked to complete a brief, annual survey describing your involvement with the organization during the past year.

Should the survey be mandatory? Should it be anonymous, or tied to identifiable individuals?

[thugsb]

Suggestion from Nadine (via text):

"Under the first item we had agreed to give recognition to volunteers. What if we gave each campaign [manager] and committee chair the right to give 1 transferable $5 off membership Thank you card a month to a volunteer, with a 1 year limit on it?"