I hope you all had a wonderful and safe summer! I enjoy the opportunity to “speak” to you through SAME’s News, an information-packed newsletter that keeps our members up-to-date on how the Society is working to meet your needs and support our Strategic Plan — my compliments to the Executive Director and Editor-in-Chief!

As you are well aware, one of my main focuses for the year is to strengthen how we support our Posts and in particular, how we can all work together to attract and retain members. After all, we are a member-based organization; without members, we have no reason for being.

The Headquarters office (HQ) is diligently working on several membership processes to better support our members. We are transitioning to annual renewals starting in January 2005 for all individual members. This will allow the Posts to begin efforts to retain members in December, follow-up in February, and concentrate the remainder of the year on recruiting new members. HQ also is working on a project to Web-enable the individual membership process, eliminating the two- to four-week delay currently experienced between the time changes are made and the membership database is updated. Finally, HQ has installed a telephone follow-up with those individual members who have not renewed their membership. We’ve found that in a majority of cases, the member has moved or changed jobs and is not receiving renewal notices in the mail.

For the Posts, your focus should be in four areas in order to be successful in satisfying members. First, you should review Post rosters monthly to identify those members who are new to the Post and those who did not renew their membership. Second, contact new members within 30 days of joining to welcome them, inform them of Post events, and ask what the Post can do to meet their professional development and business interests. You can even consider assigning a sponsor for the new member as we do in the military when we transition from installation to installation. Third, you should be proactive in contacting members who have not renewed and determine whether the Post is failing to meet their needs or expectations. Finally, and perhaps the most important, the Post needs high-impact and relevant programs. Programs should be planned to meet the needs of the major groups supporting the Post—Sustaining Members, Student Members, Young Members, Regular Members and Fellows.

Congratulations to the 11 Posts that, as of July 1, 2004 have met the criteria to win the coveted Membership Streamer:

These Posts are actively implementing the initiatives I discussed and the result is satisfied members and increased membership. Take for instance the Ft. Worth Post. Jimmy Daggett, Post Secretary, and Col. Jim Weller, USA (Ret.), Membership Committee Chairman, personally follow up on dropped members from SAME National rosters with phone calls and e-mails on a semi-monthly basis. These calls have yielded a renewal rate on the dropped members of 50% for individual members and 75% for sustaining members. The Post has found that the e-mail addresses from the national membership database are the most accurate way to contact people who have dropped. In addition, Jimmy looks for new members on the roster and sends them a welcome e-mail with information on the last meeting and the next meeting. Well done, Ft. Worth Post!

To aid in facilitating HQ and Posts to better align membership renewal and retention processes, I have asked the Executive Director and the Chair of the National Membership Committee to host a workshop, investigate current membership processes and provide recommendations to the Board of Direction for improving them. We have received extremely favorable responses from Posts in nominating delegates to this two-day workshop being held in late October, and we plan to have some recommendations to discuss at the November Board meeting.

I look forward to seeing many of you at the 3rd Annual Infrastructure Security for the Built Environment (ISBE) Conference in St Louis in November. We will be investing our 26 new Fellows, and conducting our semi-annual Senior Executive Group and Board of Direction meetings. We have an action-packed program focused on security, as well as some SAME training sessions that are designed to improve our team performance.

Keep up the good work and I hope to see many of you in my travels!