To the Members: Some Thoughts on STC’s Dues Increase
By Ben Minson on Saturday, November 7, 2009
Announcement on the STC's Notebook blog about the dues increase for 2010
Last month, STC announced a dues increase, a measure that the officers and staff had been promising since they had to take a good hard look at how to stay afloat. When announcing this change on STC’s blog, STC President Cindy Currie said:
STC spends, on average, just under $250 to provide services to a member, yet dues rates have been well below that amount. As I mentioned earlier, for several years the revenue generated by the annual conference and our earnings from invested reserves have covered the difference—until now. We need to change our business model and adopt a pay-as-you-go approach.
In 2010, dues will cover basic member benefits with a la carte pricing for additional features. The core benefits remain, but with some changes. Basic dues do not include membership in a chapter and SIG. You are encouraged to take advantage of the many local and virtual benefits offered by chapters and SIGs by purchasing a la carte membership for $25 USD and $10 USD, respectively. All members will receive the electronic version of our publications. Print subscriptions to Intercom and Technical Communication are available for $30 USD and $75 USD respectively. The 2010 membership fees, approved by the Board of Directors, are:
Basic Membership $215 USD
Students $ 75 USD
Retirees $145 USD
This means that if you pay for basic membership and add one chapter and SIG membership, you’re paying $250, a $75 increase over last year. To get print copies of Intercom and Technical Communication, you’ll pay $355, double the amount it cost for 2009 for equivalent benefits.
A Hard Hit
This is bad news for many STC members. A number of Intermountain Chapter members are self-employed, freelancers, university or college faculty, or unemployed, and this kind of expense can be hard to justify. Because employers have been cutting back expenses, many no longer sponsor STC memberships for their employees. It has been pointed out that with the current state of the economy, now was the worst time for STC to raise dues so drastically; the irony is that it was the state of the economy that caused STC to take a close look at the weak aspects of its financial model.
Tom Johnson, our Web committee manager, recently sent out a link to a brief survey to the chapter listserv, asking if members of the chapter plan to renew and why. If you haven’t yet, please take the survey. As of this writing, 46 out of about 80 chapter members have responded.
Thanks to those who discussed the dues increase on the listserv. Your views have given me a picture of how problematic the dues increase is for our chapter.
Some Frankness from the President
To be honest, I’m disappointed about the dues increase. I voiced my concern as well that eliminating the pass-through funds from STC from the dues of our members would cause problems for small chapters like ours. This has been a frustrating and troubling process to watch.
From what members of the chapter have said, a major concern is that STC’s offerings don’t justify the dues. For many, the benefits from the parent organization don’t add up. When people spend a couple hundred dollars on something, they expect some cold, hard returns, and rightly so. The fact is that if the benefits are apparent and substantial enough, then the cost is less of an issue. The problem is that the current benefits aren’t substantial enough for a number of members.
Our chapter isn’t the only one that is struggling with this problem. Many chapter presidents are concerned about loss of membership, projected and real.
What I Ask of You
While many of you will not be renewing your STC membership, I ask you to stick with the Intermountain Chapter. Our goal for this year has been to provide relevant events, but due to some of the feedback we’ve received, we’ve met with mixed success in the last several months. We have more people attending our events than last year, but we can certainly do better. I encourage you to continually provide us with feedback and suggestions, whether you’re an STC member or not.
I have heard some concern over STC’s seemingly offhand prediction that 40% of members will not renew. While that many or more of Intermountain’s members may not renew, you are still welcomed and encouraged to participate in our chapter’s functions. Whatever the parent organization’s view of this loss is, I don’t look at you as an expected casualty. We need each of you.
I see the Intermountain Chapter taking the role of sponsor of tech comm–related activities in our area. We do charge non-STC-members for some events, but we plan to do so only when it’s necessary to sustain the activities, and we’ll keep that cost as low as possible. We hold students and members of sister organizations at the same level as STC members when it comes to cost of events.
The chapter officers are working out our plan for our 2010 events, but they are by no means set in stone. Your input is valuable to us. The Intermountain Chapter can be a means of keeping the tech comm community together at this point.
If you can renew with STC, please do so. The officers and staff have had to get past the initial problem of the cash shortfall; now that that danger seems to be behind STC for 2009, your dues are still needed for 2010. Many voices have contributed ideas to what STC can offer, and I hope that if we stick around and give STC our support, we will see some great things happen over the next year that will assure us that our dues were well spent.
To those who can’t renew, please stay subscribed to the listserv and this website, and participate as much as you can. You are part of our community even if you’re not on the STC membership roster.
Wrap-up
The dues increase is hard to swallow. We can all probably think of something else we can do with $250 or $350. I completely understand if you have weighed the cost against the benefits and decided that STC membership isn’t what you need in 2010. That’s a decision each person has to make. I hope you will continue to participate and give the officers input.
Right now, it’s anyone’s guess where STC will be a year from now. The international officers and staff have done a lot of work to get STC out of the position it was in back in May, but there is much to be done still to help all members feel that what they get from STC they can’t get anywhere else. Many brilliant and experienced people are talking, and we hope that this turns into brilliant action.
Just remember that whether you renew or not for 2010, the Intermountain Chapter can be your technical communication community.
Thank you, Ben. I hope each of you realize the level of commitment this year’s IM-STC Executive board has made in your behalf. We are a small group of technical communicators hoping to make a difference in this coming year. We are a service organization dedicated to giving members and nonmembers alike training opportunities, networking outlets, and a unique perspective on technical communication in the intermountain west. As one member who may not be able to renew, I am planning to support the board going forward–regardless of whether I’m a member or not.
Thanks, Ben. I attended IM-STC long before I ever officially joined, and if this year’s economy keeps me from renewing my membership in the national organization, will still continue to participate in the local chapter. Nice to know guests are still welcome!
It is a shame to know that rates are going up so drastically. But, thank you for keeping the Intermountain-STC chapter door open to all of us, active members, past members, and interested guests. We can do better. We will. I am encouraged already. Count me in to help the chapter through this uncertain year of 2010 and onward.
Thank you for your inspirational remarks Ben. I appreciate all you do for the chapter.
I also am grateful for the offer to keep attending events if I don’t renew. The biggest value to me is to meet with my peers and listen to their experiences. Though that’s not a business-justifiable expense, it’s an important one for someone like me who doesn’t work with a group of writers.
Rich Valentine
As 1VP and member of the board that made this unpopular decision–I can tell you we did everything possible to avoid it. The “seemingly off-handed” prediction of a 60% renewal was not off-handed, and I wonder why it looked that way. It was our realistic assessment of what will happen in this economy. We typically experience a 70% renewal rate in normal times, lower when dues are increased. We have no crystal ball, but 60% was our best estimate of what would happen.
We spent a lot of time modeling what we could afford to do if we did not increase dues. We felt that we would fall below the minimum set of offerings that had to be there to justify any professional association. The rest, though unpleasant, was fairly straight-forward: “What will it cost to stay in business?” That’s what we have to take in.
I feel a little like the politician who says he can balance the budget by lowering services and increasing taxes. Boooooo! But you know…
At any rate, I echo Ben’s sentiment to stay active with your professional associates, and I add the encouragement to stay a member of STC. We will become one of the most relevant forces in our profession, but we need the participation and support of the professionals who make that profession. Please stay the course.
Michael, I appreciate your giving your perspective, and I know you’ve discussed this on your blog (and mine too). I think the concern you addressed about the 60% renewal prediction came from there being little expression of regret about losing those members who wouldn’t be able to renew, that there was something of a “business as usual” tone with that prediction. I understand that the officers and board need to carry on in a businesslike fashion to keep things going, to look forward more than backward, but the dues increase blow stung a little more for some people because the announcement came without much indication of how difficult and painful this decision was. It has been left to unofficial communications, such as your blog and the presidents’ listserv, to convey that information.
I’m sure you’ve seen (or will soon see) Tom Johnson’s post about our chapter renewal rate. 20% renewal is a grim outlook for our chapter, and as Paul points out in the comments, we didn’t ask how many would also renew with the chapter now that it’s a separate cost. In our case, a prediction of 60% seems extremely optimistic.
I’m concerned as I re-read this thread. We are now in the middle of February, and our chapter has experienced a 75% decrease in membership compared to last year. We lost 75% of our members due to the changes at the international society level.
I guess I still have hopes that we’ll get more renewals as the grace period for renewal is about to end, but seriously?! STC thought that 60% would renew? We had a small chapter to begin with, and so far, we’ve only got 25%.
As a candidate running for chapter president next year, let me echo Ben’s invitation to all you who didn’t renew: please continue to join us for our meetings. We want to help all of you continue to be more effective in your careers. We want to provide a valuable networking and professional association resource that this chapter can be, if we can keep you coming to our meetings. Stay tuned to this site to see what events are coming up, and how you can remain involved, even if you are among the 75% that we’ve lost this year.
And if you can, we’d encourage you to re-join STC. This local chapter won’t go down without a fight. We will do our best to continue to provide valuable resources to our local technical communicators. If you can help us financially to do that, please join STC. If you are in a position where you can’t. we understand. Please support us with your presence at our meetings.