Report of the MCAA Membership Committee

Words: Donald McCauley

Renewals

The MCAA has just begun our 2010-2011 membership renewal cycle. At the time of this report, the renewal dollars received were at $277,219. However, we are less than 30 days into the actual renewal cycle (starting July 1st). The total amount billed this year for renewals was $594,816. We anticipate being able to count on a minimum of 80% of those funds which puts us at the budgeted amount of $475,000. With the combined collection efforts coming from both our Membership Committee and the MCAA office, we’re confident that we will at least collect the $197,781 that’s outstanding and be able to maintain if not exceed our budget amount.

New Members

For the Association’s budget year July 1st, 2009 — June 30th, 2010 we successfully brought in a total of 60 new contractor and supplier members totaling $43,442 in dues dollars. By way of comparison, for the previous budget year July 1st, 2008 — June 30th, 2009 we also signed up 60 new members for a total dues dollar amount of $28,875.

At the time of this report, the MCAA already had three new members join (for $1500 in dues dollars) in the month of July. Our goal for the 2010-2011 budget year will be to gain $70,000 in new member dues. The committee is confident that with all our efforts combined, we should be able to reach that goal. As we continue to take a more active role in approaching the suppliers and other mason contractors to join the MCAA, it’s expected that these numbers will continue to climb.

Group Challenge Update

Our most recent Group Challenge/New member contest has just concluded. It challenged our committee to sign up 15 new MCAA members (total) prior to the start of this year’s Midyear meeting. The contest ran from approximately April 1st — July 27th. The group reward for bringing in the 15 new members was that the MCAA would treat the members of the committee to a Chicago experience (a fun outing or boat ride with lunch). We also had individual rewards built into this challenge as well. Any member who was able to sign up one new contractor member would get a $50 Visa/Amex gift card and any member that could sign up two regional or national suppliers would also earn a $50 Visa/Amex gift card. At the time of this report, we fell a bit short of our goal as our group was able to successfully bring in 9 new members toward the group goal totaling $3,707 in new revenue. Additionally, there were several committee members who did earn individual rewards. They were: Alan Johnson, Don McCauley, and Dennis Withsosky. Congratulations to everyone who worked so hard on this!

Monthly Member Postcard Program & Working the Hanley Wood List

We’ve started a new postcard program for members. Each month we will advise members on different aspects and benefits relating to their membership. In addition, as new developments and current events arise, we’ll share that information by putting it into a postcard and send it out to everyone. The idea is to help make our members more aware of all the benefits and services they’re offered through membership.

Also, we’ve begun to utilize the Hanley Wood lists more heavily to get our message out to new member prospects. We’ve developed a separate postcard program for this with drop dates in place every 30-60 days. We provide them with the postcards. Then they will label and ship them out to over 4000 of their masonry contacts and customers. We’re allowed 3-4 paid mailings per year (according to our contract) so after that, we’ll pick up the remaining cost.

Plans for the 2011 Convention

The MCAA is once again looking ahead to the upcoming Convention as it represents our greatest opportunity to recruit new members at one time. Again, we will plan to have our booth covered by volunteer committee members and officers during the 3 main exhibit days. We also plan on having a greeter in the booth to help us slow down traffic in an effort to bring prospects over for us to talk to. We are discussing the possibility of using a different greeter than we’ve had in the past. Whoever we use, they must be able to stop folks in order to get them talking and thinking about our association — and not be shy about it. Lastly, we’re in the process of developing some “round-table” topics to discuss at scheduled times in our booth. This is going to be something new for us to try. The goal is to schedule these table talks & promote the topics (with the help of Hanley Wood) so that we can have a good mix of members and non-member attendees present and contributing.
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