Sales and marketing staff would be delighted to have the benefit of some brainstorming on this topic. If we could set aside an hour or perhaps 90 minutes for this at a set time during the meeting -- perhaps the last 90 minutes of the Friday session before adjournment for dinner -- Mark Wilson and I would like Dennis Motschenbacher and Bob Inderbitzen to join us to hear the ideas that bubble up. Dennis is looking at everything through fresh eyes. I think Tom is correct in his focus on the number of new licensees as opposed to the total number of licensees, which is a meaningless statistic. An even better number, if we knew what it was, is the number of active licensees. Our membership is drawn almost exclusively from the ranks of active amateurs. The more active amateurs there are, the more ARRL members there will be. New licensees who never get on the air are not good prospects. Neither are long-time licensees who long ago lost interest. A member who loses interest is unlikely to renew. How do we get new hams on the air, and keep them on? How do we maintain present members' interest? How do we reactivate those whose interest has flagged? We've had our successes but as Kay says, we can always do better -- and we're heading into a sunspot decline which is going to have a negative effect on some fields of activity. Dave K1ZZ -----Original Message----- From: Kay Craigie [mailto:wt3p@earthlink.net] Sent: Wednesday, June 26, 2002 9:33 PM To: arrl-odv Subject: [ARRL-ODV:7405] Re: Members without access? Non issue... Tom's point about no-growth in the ham population is well taken. It's not a comfortable spot we're in. However, adding more hams isn't quite the key to ARRL's advertising situation. New hams won't help us convince advertisers to buy more ads in QST/QEX/NCJ, unless we can convince those new hams to join the ARRL and become part of the audience for the advertisements. To improve our financial position in all respects, we not only need to recruit more hams, we need to recruit and retain more League members. It's true that membership didn't decline as much as past experience predicted, following the last dues increase, but I file that under "cold comfort." We have an effective organization with good products, programs, and services. What do we need to do to communicate that more persuasively to the hams, new and old, whom we haven't been able to convince in the past? How do we improve our member retention rates? They're not bad, but they could always be better. Does staff feel confident they can handle this, given the staff reorganization in sales and marketing, or would some Board family brainstorming be a productive use of some of our time together? 73 - Kay WT3P --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.372 / Virus Database: 207 - Release Date: 6/20/2002