We all know it's important to chase lapsed members. By the time it's got to an LLO these members have received 2 renewal invoices, but is there a better way of doing this?
- should LLOs be chasing lasped members? As we can now personalise our emails - should membership just run a report email of all lapsed members with the sort of email you're sending, then give you the last lot in October?
- is the personal touch from the LLO better?
- what have LLOs found to be useful (email is better than phone etc)
- are there serial offenders who only renew when the LLO contacts them and is this a problem?
- does anyone know what other associations do?
- are we choosing the best time to be chasing members - should we do it earlier, later etc?
3 comments:
Hmmm tricky. I didn't ring one person this year, I just used email and I got a far better response rate and no abuse! People were more willing to give a reason or sometimes their life history in an email too. I think for most people it is not as intrusive as a phone call. You also get immediate feedback when the address bounces back so you know that this person requires more detective work. When I rang people last year they were very unwilling to tell me where the person had gone to or give me any information at all.
I am wondering Robyn whether this "member value brochure" idea could be done and ready for next year (or sooner!!) so that for those people who are missing from work we could send that out with a standard letter to their home address. Yes, its fiddly but it wouldn't be so many - just the missing people maybe?
I am surprisingly still getting the occasional response from the email messages from those who were on LSL or holiday, so this method works for WA better than a phone message anyway.
I think email is a pretty efficient way to do it, but if it could be done by Natl Office that would be great. The email could include a link to online payment, which might make things really easy for members(do we have online payment for membership? not sure, but it would be good because people could change their details as well as pay) Then our energies could go into phone contact with the really, really tardy ones. It would also be nice to have the renewals sorted into groups by fee -- I want to put my efforts into full fee paying personal members, esp when I have so many to do. I've had to do the sorting, and with the hundreds I've got, it takes a lot of time to just do this part of the process.
I agree with Nat that you tend to get better feedback with email -- I hate leaving phone messages and then you end up playing phone tag. I find some people just pay up once they get the email and don't even reply to me.
I am certainly seeing "repeat" offenders, and wonder if they are waiting, like Jane says. A few email reminders, early on, might stop this, not sure.
When are unfinancial members actually cut off -- not sure I know the answer to this, but it seems to me that maybe we carrying unfinancial people a little too long. What do the rest of you think?
I obviously don't have as many people to chase up as NSW I only had 111 pieces of paper!!!! However this still equates to a lot of work sorting, emailing and following up. This year I still have 48 people out of the 111 who are unfinancial or have mysteriously disappeared (I think they moved to NSW!), 37 out of the 111 are now current and 26 out of the 111 resigned.
This, even though it sounds depressing is actually better than last year, so I will definately be using the email method again.
I was also wondering if Nat Office might be interested in posting a list of the mysteries online so that we can each look at them and see if we recognize them from other states????? Too much work????
Nat
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