Report of the MCAA Membership Committee

Words: Donald McCauley

Renewals

The MCAA has just completed its renewal cycle. With just over $426,197 brought in or committed to for the 2011-2012 renewals, we fell short of our budget number of $464,600 that was targeted. In addition, we’ve kept memberships active for 8-10 contractor companies that have told us they will be paying their dues. They’ll account for an additional $13,747 (bringing the total renewal amount to approx. $440,000). We are confident that we will get all of these funds collected. One of the factors related to our shortfall had to do with a larger than expected downward adjustment in overall sales volume reported by our members within the last year. This accounted for a total loss of $25,667 in revenue.

New Members

Through December 31, 2011 the MCAA has welcomed 36 new members (YTD) into the association accounting for approx. $20,287. Our budget number for the year is to gain $35,000 in new member revenue and we’re well on our way to reaching that goal. The committee is confident, however, that with all our new efforts to reach out to local Masonry Organizations we will be able to carry our message out and continue to grow our membership at a pace that will far exceed our past efforts. We will continue to take a more active role in activating our member base; by giving encouragement through incentives for existing members and new members that will encourage them to approach the suppliers and other mason contractors in their areas to get them to join.

Monthly Prospect Postcard Program & Working the Hanley Wood List

We recently teamed up with Infogroup on a combined list purchase of masonry contractors and a target email campaign in an effort to help boost membership. The list we purchased has over 7000 contractors from all over the country. We targeted about 2500 companies off that list in our initial 2 mailings highlighting specific benefits and topics related to membership. We also email blasted those same individuals twice in an effort to offer them participation in a free webinar. We actually had 6 individuals from that campaign sign up to participate and we’re actively pursuing them for membership. Our strategy is to send out 6 additional postcard mailings to that list in the following order:

January- Safety Advantage postcard
February-Education postcard
March- Codes and Standards postcard
April- Networking opportunities postcard
May- Your Voice in Washington postcard
June- Member ‘Perks’ postcard

Also, we’ll continue to use the Hanley Wood lists heavily to get our message out to new member prospects. This involves a timely postcard program with drop dates in place every 60 days or so. We’ll provide them the postcards. They will label and ship them out to over 2500 of their masonry contacts and customers. We’re allowed 2-3 paid mailings per year (according to our contract) so after that we’ll pick up the remaining cost.

Plans for the 2011 Convention

The MCAA is once again changing things up for Convention this year. We plan on spending some of the time in our booth, however the majority of the time we will be out around our Skills Challenge area on Tuesday when exhibits open and at the Spec Mix Bricklayer 500 on Wednesday. There will be a separate MCAA ‘tent’ set up at these events to help draw in traffic & encourage new members to join. Everyone who can is encouraged to stop by and help in the recruiting effort.

New this year

We will be hosting a Money Grab Booth sponsored by Spec Mix out in the gold lot during the Bricklayer 500. Any new members joining will automatically be allowed entry into the booth. The current MCAA member who refers the most new members to sign up for membership during the show will also get entry into the money booth. Lastly, we will hand out raffle tickets on Tuesday & Wednesday to anyone who stops by the MCAA tent and randomly enter them into a drawing to go inside the Money Booth. We are looking forward to finalizing the details of Money Grab and hope to see a slight improvement in terms of overall traffic numbers this year.
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