2005 Membership Administrator’s Report
from Iris Hardin, Membership Administrator
My first 6 months as Membership Administrator have been
both personally rewarding and professionally productive. Members
and staff quickly brought me up to speed on the CLF culture,
and the latter have been very receptive to a newcomer’s
ideas for increasing the efficiency of our Membership Enrollment
process, with the added benefit of reducing associated costs.
In addition to my Membership duties, I am responsible for
the following:
- answering all email that comes to the clf@uua.org account
- moving Quest through the production process.
Membership Enrollment
When I first arrived, the Membership Enrollment process involved
tracking quite a bit of information on various paper lists.
This aspect of the process has been consolidated and moved
to electronic format, saving quite a bit of time (and a few
trees).
More significant is the way we handle Full vs. Trial Members.
Previously, we considered people who either contributed or
pledged donations in their applications Full Members. Since
many of the pledged donations were never realized, however,
we decided to make only those who actually donate at the time
of application Full Members. All others are tracked as Trial
Members until we received their pledged contributions, at
which time we convert their memberships to Full. We make all
of this very clear in our correspondence. Because we send
Member Packets out only to Full Members, and because the processing
of Trials takes less time, this makes much more sense from
both cost and time perspectives. Also, knowing that their
memberships will be discontinued if they don’t “make
good” on their pledges provides real incentive to people.
Now that I’m comfortable with the process, my goals
for the future include tracking more carefully our retention
of members and our conversion of Trial Members to Full Membership.
Email
Answering email coming into the CLF could be a full-time job.
These messages include membership applications, inquiries
about what the CLF is, questions about our Prison Pen Pals
program, general theology questions, solicitations for money
to sponsor translations of Quest into other languages,
inquiries about other CLFers in remote parts of the US or
world, etc. I answer as many of these messages as I can personally
and pass along those that I can or should not handle myself.
Quest
I have recently transitioned into the role of Quest
Production Manager. This involves keeping a calendar/schedule
of where we are and should be with the 3 issues that are always
in the pipeline, reminding the Editor and other Quest
team members what they should be reading, writing, and editing
at any particular time.
Last updated June 12, 2005
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