BBVX Blog

The membership brochure says that branches cannot accept credit card payments. This is false in at least some cases (e.g. AAUW CA Onlne) and the wording should be clarified.

A member may transfer from one branch to another on a “no fee” basis as long as the current year dues have been paid to the first branch.

The situation is different for at-large members, though. Part of the problem is that at-large members have an expiration date based on when they first joined, while all branch memberships expire on June 30.

Over the last few years, the following conflicting statements have been declared to be policy:

1. An MAL may join a branch without paying Association dues if there is at least three months left on their current at-large membership.
2. An MAL who joins a branch and does not pay Association dues for another fiscal year will have their expiration date shifted to June 30 of the year in which their membership currently expires.

Consider the case of a person who pays at-large dues in November of 2005 and then joins a branch May of 2006. Under the first policy, s/he’d need to pay only branch/state dues to be a member through June 30, 2007. In the second s/he’d need to pay Association dues as well.

While we may not want to go to full pro-rated dues, whatever the policy is should be defined and documented. The current “call the helpline to find out what the dues are” is not acceptable and may very well lead to errors (we’ve had at-large members who paid state/national dues but got months cut off their Association membership) and confusion on the part of branch treasurers and membership vps. (more…)

At-large members may join through www.aauw.org. I’d think it would be possible to have a “support AAUW in your state” checkbox on that form, collect some amount of additional (which wouldn’t need to be the same as the amount the states collect from branch members) for at-large state membership, and remit a portion of that back to the states.

Could this program be rolled out with just a few participating states? Approval might be required by those state boards, but who else would need to agree?

The benefit to the Association (aside from setting the fees to more than recover their costs), would, I think, be a demo of “national dues collection.” a program that I expect we must be moving towards but which will take a good deal of “selling” to the branches.

If someone remits dues more than once in a fiscal year, their membership expiration date is extended by a year. Could this informal process be formalized? For instance

• Allow prepayment of dues for (2? 3? 5?) years at the current rate.
• Allow payment of life membership in (2? 3? 5?) installments [with later installments paid at prevailing rate?]

There are obviously technical challenges here, but I’d think that an attempt to implement either of these programs might encourage process improvements that would benefit all members. With the gradual dues increase, I’d expect that the prepayment options would not have an adverse fiscal effect.

My other membership organizations (professional/honorary societies, mostly) offer a wide range of membership “discounts”. As the new database/financial infrastructure comes online, perhaps some of these would be appropriate for consideration with the goal of increasing the number of supporters on our rolls:

• half-dues for the second (third? etc?) member at an address (with only one copy of Association publications going to that address)
• reduced dues (for a year? or two?) for those who are unemployed.
• reduced dues for those who have paid Association dues for 30? (40?) years, are retired (and are on limited incomes?).
• Add an “18-month” membership option to be effective Jan 1-Mar. 15 as an alternative to the 6-month membership. This could offer some discount for those who join through the next fiscal year (and avoid having the branch send an invoice to someone whose first check just cleared

Over the years, I’ve had several discussions on membership issues. Just like with the comments on the web site (see the www.aauw.org category), these comments seem to go into a black hole somewhere. I don’t want to nag folks by repeating these comments, but I don’t want them to get “lost” either. This category will be a repository for ideas and comments and I will also post replies so that some of these can be put to rest once and for all.

Apologies to those who think these comments should be posted at http://discuss.aauw.org. However that seems to be “too public” a venue for these comments - in this venue, which I control and for which I am responsible, I can feel free to express frustrations that might be inappropriate there.

The TUAG is reviewing an online version of the BDR - “Branch Dues Report” submitted by each branch with the dues of renewing members, so this may be moot, but I’d like to document it.

The report has a final summary page. [See example summary Page] The problem with the table on that page is that there’s “N/A” in the spot where one would enter the number of renewing MBHL and MBL members. Even though they pay no dues to the Association, they need to be included in the count of renewing members for the sake of any reconciliation with branch records. The lines for MBHL and renewing MBL members should, I think, look like the lines for Dual Members. The report may need a new line for new life members (those paying 20 times the current annual branch dues in order to join the Association “for life”).

[On another topic, this form shows Associate members paying $15 dues (rather than the amount charged to branch members as specified in the bylaws). However, this isn’t a big deal since all Associate members were admitted before July 1, 1957 and cannot rejoin if they drop membership. Therefore, this problem will go away next year when all remaining Associate members will qualify for MAHL status and so their Association dues will drop to $0.]

Severity: minor
Audience: small
Fiscal effect: no - but for the aggravation that may cause a branch treasurer to drop out
Policy question: maybe
Reported: yes, just now to the helpline (Check # comment, anyway)
Link: http://www.aauw.org/member_center/forms/AAUW_ADR_ADDITIONAL_DUES_REMITTANCE_FY0607.doc

Okay, this whole thing may go away and be replaced by a web application (hallelujah!), but for now this is just annoying.

1. The above form needs to be sent to the state and the Association, so there are two checks that need to be sent, but there’s only one spot to write them in. Why can’t there be a check # row at the bottom?

2. Would it be so hard to put in the Word form field that would total the amounts into the total row? [Yeah, it’d probably cause confusion — I, for instance, don’t know how to get the total to print without refreshing the form fields with F9, but we could try. Worst case, folks just write over it with the total they’ve calculated some other way.]

3. It would have been nice to have had these forms distributed in a more platform independent way- OpenOffice, for instance. Again, since they’re going away (I expect), this is probably not worth the effort, but I wanted to document this.

For an example of how NC changed the forms to meet the above requirements, see

http://bbvx.org/2005/TechNotes/NCResources/index.htm
which is based on the 04-05 forms. Since the forms are changing every year, we haven’t been keeping those up to date…

Severity: moderate
Audience: moderate
Fiscal effect: yes
Policy question: no
Reported: yes
Link: https://svc.aauw.org/contribute/ef.cfml

Leslie reports that she’s unable to use the page above to make an online donation. She enters info on a “gift in memory,” says to “use the money where most needed,” says the “billing address same as my address,” but when she clicks “continue” she just gets sent back to the initial page. No charges have posted to her account.

Staff say they can’t reproduce the problem.

There have been intermittent problems with the credit card payment for the last couple of years — and times when the “internal” testing was actually testing something different from what external users see. [I don’t think either of those issues have been reported before in this system.]

This is posted to “training wish list” because I think there’s the start of a session on how to do branch web sites using a “content management system”. In the spring of 2005, the Association considered an agreement with a Michigan company who rolled out www.aauwonline.com as a platform for for AAUW branches. Their system was based on Mambo (which has since forked to the open source Joomla! system) and a few branches signed up, but I don’t know of any who actually got their sites up and running. I played with the system some and found Mambo much too “heavy” for branch use. WordPress is, in contrast, a simpler, more flexible system. Large branches with strong needs for communication and member dialog may want to explore other systems (e.g. Drupal/CivicSpace or the Xoops described by my co-author), but WordPress is, I think, the right tool for many branches.

With Douglass Davis of St. Augustine’s College, I gave a talk on PHP-based Content Management Systems at the Triangle PHP Users’ Group (www.tripug.org) meeting on Wednesday, May 3.

• Introduction: slides
• Douglass Davis, XOOPS: slides
• Nancy Shoemaker, WordPress: slides, handout

[If you don’t have PowerPoint installed, you can use the PPT Viewer to open the “slides” above. Note that the handout above is a PDF file with clickable links to the resources indicated.]

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