LLC Membership Issues (18/05/2007, Melissa Terras)
1. Membership Numbers
As of 18/5/07, there were 205 subscribers to LLC. This is an increase of 27 members, or 15%, up from 178 from the same period last year.
The rise in individual memberships can be attributed to the following:
- Chasing committee members to ensure they are paid up members. Last year, more than a few individuals serving on both the ADHO organisations were not paid up subscribers to LLC. This has been mostly rectified.
- The redesign and availability of promotional material, advertising the benefits of LLC and allowing people to sign up easily.
- A mailshot undertaken to all past subscribers whose membership lapsed since 2001.
- Making the combined membership plus conference attendance rate for members much less than the conference attendance fee for non-members. It is therefore economical to become a member to attend the conference.
2. Redesign of LLC promotional material
In December 2006 an LLC promotional leaflet was designed, in liaison with OUP, ACH president, ALLC chair, and LLC editor. This is now available for all committee members to distribute. Each committee member was provided with a stash of leaflets to distribute whilst on their travels. More leaflets are available if they are needed. Committee members are encouraged to publicise LLC and ACH.
3. Mailshot
Almost 200 lapsed subscribers to LLC were contacted as part of mailshot carried out in January at UCL. An individual letter was written to each lapsed subscriber. Half of the new subscribers are those who were contacted and have reactivated their membership (the mailshot included contacting committee members!)
4. Membership breakdown
| Membership Type | Number of Members |
|---|
| ACH Personal | 56 |
| ACH Student | 6 |
| ACH Senior Citizen | 4 |
| ALLC Personal | 69 |
| ALLC Student | 5 |
| ALLC Senior Citizen | 1 |
| Joint ALLC/ACH Personal | 46 |
| Joint ALLC/ACH Student | 16 |
5. Institutional Membership
6. Membership issues reported
Various membership issues have been noticed in the past year, and various problems reported.
Problems include:
- Individuals being charged institutional rates
- Individuals being given different membership numbers with each issue of the journal
- The website being down, and OUP not being aware of this
- Emails not being answered by the email address given on the OUP website regarding membership
- Faxes being ignored by OUP
- The need for two different users names on the OUP website
- The OUP website not supporting international character sets in common usage
- Lack of feedback mechanism and useful error messages on OUP website
- OUP website not working properly in browsers other than MSIE
- The fact that the OUP membership website seems to be in beta testing, but there is no opportunity for users to contact OUP or report faults when problems occur
- Outmoded and out of date information on the webpage (for example, the link on the front page regarding “how to sign up to be referee” has been broken for years, and reported often)
Membership Concerns include
- The length of time it takes to process subscriptions made by post
- The length of time it takes to enter members onto the database once payment has been actioned
- Membership details that go “missing”: individuals who are known to have paid their subscriptions but which never appear on the database
- The difference between membership ID numbers in the database supplied to the societies, and the membership ID numbers supplied to individuals. Occasionally, these are two different numbers.
- The length of time taken for a response from OUP regarding problems reported