In June the Board considered and approved the report of the Membership Review Group chaired by Oceania Director and Membership Committee chair Mary-Jane Rivers. The report is the summation of several months work including the membership survey sent to members earlier this year.
Committee chair Mary-Jane Rivers. Other members of the group were Anna Chworow, Charlie McConnell, Jackie Arreaza, Maryam Ahmadain, Muhamello Shitu, Rob Gregory.
.The aim of the review was to look at ways of strengthening our membership in terms of increasing recruitment, renewals, engagement and sustainability.
The Conclusions of the Report highlight that:
IACD is seen as a respected, recognised and relevant organisation. We are in an uniquely leading position, particularly with our UN affiliation link. Overall, the review group considers that IACD has the right inclusive approach of being open to both individuals and organisations.
Our membership is almost exclusively community development practitioners, development agencies, trainers and students. Some belong simply because they believe in community development and want to support IACD. IACD membership has seen a slow but steady growth over the past few years. There has been much improvement in the recruitment of members and there is still opportunity for more. Retention remains our Achilles heel with a particularly noticeable fall-off following the ‘Community is the Answer Conference’.
While we can expect to grow each of these groups as members, particularly students, a key for potential development is in national/country network membership and affiliation.
This would augment member benefits and help IACD achieve another level of networking which is something our members are seeking.
As well, only so much can be expected from individual, and even organisational, membership in terms of providing IACD income. Two other international organisations, the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) and International Association of Impact Assessment (IAIA) have positioned themselves as influential and as the standard setting organisations providing a strong ‘add value’ for members who see kudos in belonging
Opportunities for building on the good work already undertaken by IACD to increase and retain membership. We certainly need to think how we can get the 3000 subscribers to join us. Perhaps an incentive reduced rate? Numbers give us more legitimacy.
These include:
If IACD expands beyond the current individual and organisational membership approach, and also strengthen the professional standing of IACD for potential members the review group is keen to ensure and inclusion. We do not want to see excluded the community organisers, animators, volunteers and activists who don’t see themselves as professionals. We want to maintain diversity. It was agreed that embracing language in our communications/marketing is the key
The directions for increasing membership fall into two categories:
- Refining and building on the current membership systems and improvements that have already occurred. This includes focusing on promoting the current membership benefits and moving to 3 year memberships as the norm. There is a sense that IACD members may not be seeing full benefits in a one year membership especially when there are no networking events within that year.
- Areas of Newer Development – expanding the IACD structure to step up IACD as a networked, membership organisation with influence through:
- national/country networks of practitioners or self-organising groups. For this there is much to learn from IFSW and IAIA about the development, support, funding and membership charges
- potentially special interest or theme groups eg around health and environmental issues, related to SDGs
- UN –affiliated community development organisations becoming members of IACD
- sufficient number of events to promote networking
- the idea of a solidarity fund whereby members in richer countries twin with those in poorer and in effect pay their fee or a part of it.
Recommendations
- Building on Current Membership Strengths
- Refining Current Membership Approach
- Actively promote 3 year membership recruitment identifying the benefits of 3 years compared with one year, and using an opt-out model for renewal payments where possible
- Special Offers
In order to expand membership in two areas of low uptake introduce as special offers:
- A lower fee for organisations with an annual turnover of more than £500,000. For non-OECD countries set fees at £100 for one year and £200 for three years and for OECD countries £200 for one year and £400 for three years
- Offer a discount on Life membership for a limited period of time
- Attract Students
Actively encouraging longer term involvement in IACD and bringing in younger generations was seen as important to promote and pursue, through:
- Increasing student benefits (eg member only international reading list) and interaction with other Community Development students (online exchange)
- Adding a student fee for non-OECD countries of £10 for one year and £20 for three years
- Increasing student fees for OECD countries to £15 and £30 for three years
- Introducing a discount of 25% on three year membership on graduation, for those graduates of universities who are IACD members
- Limit the number of discounted places for conferences and events per organisation. One suggestion is a maximum of 4, 6 and 8 places according to annual turnover.
- Produce and offer an IACD member logo, with agreement based on sign up to a set of terms and conditions
- Membership Management – additional streamlining
- Invest in making improvements to the database to record more information with the aim of connecting better with our members and identifying trends. Information could include:
- number of members in any year and the attrition rate
- motive for joining
- how people heard about IACD
- who individual members are and any organisations they are associated
- Add an automatic renewal on Stripe and link to manual renewal via Stripe on website
- Accept Western Union payments and state this on the website (add under payment methods)
- Promote Membership Benefits
- Communicate member benefits clearly to avoid disappointment and false expectations (including stating what we do not offer)
- Enhancement of Current Membership Benefits
- Look for additional deals and spin offs for members (eg. Get2grips with grants, and the subscription discount for the CDJ journal as a member benefit[1])
- Improve the member-only web pages
- Create a funder database for members only
- Improve the look of the e-bulletin
- Carry-out regular surveys of member satisfaction
- Personalise Member Contact
- Bi-annual e-mail to all subscribers to check they receive the e-bulletin, encourage them to join and make a donation to support the network (but not an obligatory fee as a subscriber)
- Organisation members receive hard copies of their welcome letter, certificate, Practice Insights and Annual Report by post when they join
- Areas of Newer Development – Expanding the IACD Membership Structure
Connect the drive for increased membership with encouragement of networks and the development of events that increase membership benefits and the ‘value-add’ of IACD
- Consider adding national networks as a category
- Encourage the development of country/national community development networks – and these networks to become IACD network members. These may grow out of existing informal connections, self-organising groups or around student/practitioner learning groups. This approach could support the role of country correspondents and regional directors
- We will need to consider how individual members of an existing network might join IACD and/or whether the network as a group might join, and as such what is the system and level of subscription fees. (IFSW bases its national membership association fee upon the respective number of members with $1.5 p.a. per member being the average fee).
- Explore the potential of special interest or theme groups
These may connect with other fields eg gender and community development, environment, health, resilience etc related to the Sustainable Development Goals
- Invite UN-affiliated Community development NGOs to join IACD as members
We might consider a one-off incentive three year subscription to attract such organisations to join IACD.
You can read the full report here.
Membership review report_june_2015 (1)
