Membership Drive Report to DuPont Retirees Chapter (DRC) 9/19/2017
This is a summary report of the DRC Membership Drive we initiated in early August. Our basic approach was to ask current members to reach out to non-member retirees in their personal networks (and they do theirs, and they to theirs, etc.), and encourage them all to join DRC in a self-propagating wave of connections. Many of you have done this and your support is deeply appreciated. We have limited information on how many contacts and enrollments have taken place at each stage of this process, and can only report on the total results of the membership drive.
Our efforts have resulted in 93 additional enrollments, the largest step increase in membership since our launch on 7/18/2016. This is 20% of the total increase since startup, and 6% of the total enrollment; while this is respectable, we did not come close to achieving our 5,000 membership goal.
The DRC Membership History graph below provides a good view of our development and current status.
Additional Comments on DRC Membership History and Drive
Displaying membership count on a daily basis clearly shows significant enrollment increases immediately following most pension security-related communications and events. This strong correlation was discussed and demonstrated by our 7/31 Report and associated graph, sent to DRC members and posted on our webpage. This correlation, between our communications/actions and DRC membership growth, is not easily visible on the graph above, since here we show DRC status only at the end of each month, in order to provide a historical view of our growth.
The DRC Membership Drive was a multi-faceted effort:
- We sent out 1457 emails to our current membership asking all to reach out to their contacts and invite them to join our DRC group and effort.
- 176 emails were sent to retirees on the "Unsubscribed" list. Of the 26 responses, only one person actually wanted to be unsubscribed, while 25 said that they did not deliberately unsubscribe and asked to be re-enrolled. By extension, this implies that most of those who did not respond are also unaware that they are unsubscribed.
- Incorrect email addresses and other issues generate error messages that our email is “undeliverable”, and this will cause members’ accounts to be disabled. We corrected many such problems and re-enabled 29 accounts.
- We have begun to use social media to make retirees aware of our NRLN Chapter. We have created a Facebook group called DuPont Retirees NRLN, to lead them to guide others to DRC webpage, and enroll. We also plan to use Twitter and LinkedIn in a similar manner. It is too early to see the impact of our social media efforts, but it is another way for people to find us.
Conclusions
As indicated above, we sent out 1457 emails to our current membership; within 10 days, 746 recipients opened the email for a 51% opening rate (the causes of unopened emails are overwhelmed in-boxes, lack of time/interest, but most likely spam controls set to quarantine suspect emails). While an over 50% open rate is generally considered very good response for such organizational “bulk communications”, unless we can boost our ability to communicate with DRC members, we will unlikely to be able to grow our numbers significantly, and therefore further increase our “voice” and capacity to act, if and when that might become necessary. As long as retirees feel their pension is fairly secure and the risk is low, the goal of reaching 5000 members may not be achievable with the “opt in” approach we have taken, simply inviting people to visit our website to review our communications and join if they wish.
Your questions and comments, directly to the email addresses below, are always welcome.
Paul Kende paul.kende@gmail.com and
Jim Odle, DRC President odlejk@gmail.com