WWA Membership Committee
Meeting Minutes
February 11, 2014 at 10:00AM
Attendees
Paul Boersma, Steve Kluesner, Kevin Richardson, Katie Karow, Jason Bordewyk
1.Membership Summit Report
Paul prepared a summary and sent to all committee members. The summary will also be included in the next newsletter. Highlights of the summary were discussed.
a.The speaker at the summit was Sheri Jacobs. She has a book called “The Art of Membership” that is a good read and has valuable information. Organizations are affected by doing more with less, easy availability of information, expectations for customized services, and generational changes.
b.People join for organizations for some reason. We need to find out what these reasons are and how to support members reasons for joining. Are the reasons networking, to give back to the profession, to obtain technical information, other?
c.Paul offered to lend his copy of the book to committee members.
d.Paul’s interaction with AWWA staff has been wonderful and impressive. AWWA provides high quality resources and information and we can rely on them more for support.
Action:
None.
2.Membership Challenge Goals - 2014
Wisconsin Section was one of a handful of sections to meet our membership challenge goal for 2013. We were given a $316 check from National AWWA for our efforts. It was discussed to use this money to give back to members.
a.Retain 46 of our 69 new members. Our focus should be on each new member. It was discussed to use the money earned to welcome new members. We need to show the organization’s relevance to new members.
It was discussed to send out a survey to new members to help us identify their expectations and relevance of WWA. It was decided that a personal phone call perhaps followed by an email/survey would be more appropriate and lead to more useful responses. Some useful talking points were discussed and generally include:
Have you used WWA resources?
Have you attended WWA educational seminars or classes?
Have you used the WWA website?
What are you looking for from WWA?
b.Grow membership to 833. This is a secondary goal and we appear to be on track to be able to accomplish this goal as well.
c.Other Membership Goals. Paul wants us all to get engaged more with using the website. We are going to focus as a committee on the retaining new member goal.
Action:
Paul to contact National AWWA to obtain the new member list. Katie will obtain the list from the database and Paul and Katie will compare the lists. The final list will be sent to Kevin.
Kevin will divide the list appropriately between committee members and will send out the list for contacting. Kevin will also prepare a list of talking points to use when making the calls.
3.Member Retention
a.Steve K. continues to contact late members each month. Steve focuses his contacts to individual, operator, and student members. Steve just received the February report and will begin contacting late members. Steve typically contacts late members on a one month delay as past experience shows many renew shortly after expiration date.
b.Steve S. will continue to send new member welcome letters. Paul will contact Steve to update as there are a few letters that need to be sent this month.
Action:
Steve K. will continue to contact late members.
Steve S. will continue to send new member welcome letters.
4.Follow up on last month’s action items
a.All committee members were reminded to continue to actively recruit new members.
b.Paul sent out an appointment last month for this year’s meeting dates. Meetings will be held the second Tuesday of each month at 10:00 am.
c.All committee members present have been on the WWA website and have setup their user accounts. Paul asked Steve K. to post minutes to the website.
d.The upcoming newsletter will have Paul’s summary of the Membership Summit and the Membership Report. It was discussed to include all of the names of our new members in an article for the next newsletter. Perhaps the names could be included in the “What’s Happening” section.
Action:
Continue to recruit new members.
Post meeting minutes to website.
5.Next Meeting
Next Meeting - Tuesday, March 11, 2014, 10:00 AM.
Prepared and respectfully submitted by Steve Kluesner.