ASHRAE Insights

By Billy Austin, Membership Promotion chair

Your phone is ringing and you have to move the latest new stack of mail, faxes, folders, and your ASHRAE dues renewal out of the way. This stack of stuff gets hastily put on top of the existing stack of stuff, which has now accumulated four ASHRAE dues renewal invoices! The phone call is from the ASHRAE Membership Promotion (MP) Committee, which prompts you to hand off the dues notice for payment.

 The above scenario is typical of how many ASHRAE members’ dues get paid. To achieve membership growth, MP Committees first have to put their fingers into the leaking dike of existing ASHRAE membership.

For the past several years, ASHRAE has had a healthy influx of new members. Unfortunately, we’ve also had a corresponding outflux of existing members. Why? ASHRAE recently commissioned a survey of its members and former members, finding that that 34% of former members are no longer members because they “misplaced their dues notice and forgot” or “never received a reminder.”

ASHRAE realizes that if we are to grow in membership, we’ve got to first keep the members we’ve got. That would be easy enough if our total membership were 1,000 members and 7% of them had delinquent dues. But, we currently have 50,000 members at this typical 7% rate! What if we had 500,000 members and 7% of them were delinquent? Who would call these 35,000 delinquent members?

ASHRAE is currently making systematic changes on several fronts that will likely improve our membership retention. This article is an effort on one of these fronts. It is an appeal directly to you.

Go online and pay your dues www.ashrae.org/members, or give your dues renewal notice to your office manager for payment when you see it come in the mail. Also, remember to visit www.ashrae.org to manage your membership information or contact ASHRAE directly when your contact information changes.