We heard a version of this story from several small-creamery members this spring, but one member's telling of it has stuck with us, so we're sharing it with her permission, without her name attached. She runs a one-person farmstead cheese operation in the upper Midwest — milks a small herd, makes, ages, and sells almost everything herself — and she told us plainly that when her membership renewal notice came up last year, she almost let it go.
"I was doing the math on everything," she told us, "and a trade association felt like the easiest thing to cut. I wasn't going to any conferences. I wasn't going anywhere." That's a completely reasonable read of a membership's value when the thing you associate most with it — a room full of other cheesemakers, a conference hotel, a trade-show floor — had vanished from the calendar entirely. For a one-person operation counting every line item twice, a dues renewal with no obvious in-person payoff is an easy thing to let lapse.
What changed her mind
What kept her renewing, in the end, wasn't anything we'd have guessed a year earlier: it was the online coursework. She'd never taken a virtual class through us before 2020, mostly because her schedule as a one-person operation didn't leave room for travel to in-person sessions, and a weekend away from the cave and the herd was rarely worth what it cost her in missed makes. When the calendar went virtual, that barrier disappeared, and she worked through several courses from her own kitchen table between makes — cave management fundamentals, a pricing and margin session she said "should've been required reading years ago," and a defect-diagnosis course she took specifically because she had a persistent rind problem she couldn't identify on her own.
"I got more out of this year of courses than I got out of the two conferences I went to before," she said, and was quick to add that she didn't mean the conferences weren't good — just that a one-person operation rarely gets uninterrupted time to sit through structured coursework, and a year without travel accidentally gave her exactly that. She finished the pricing course over three lunch breaks spread across a week, something she said would never have happened with a course that required a flight and a hotel room.
The rind problem, for what it's worth, turned out to be a humidity issue in her aging space rather than anything in her make — something she says she'd been guessing at for two years before the course finally gave her a framework to actually diagnose it instead of just reacting to it.
What we're taking from it
We're not holding this up as proof that virtual coursework should replace in-person events — our members have told us clearly, including in this week's own workshop recap from Brooklyn, that some skills genuinely need a room and a table of real wheels, not a screen. But her story is a useful corrective to an assumption we'd made ourselves: that a membership's core value, for a small solo operation, is the community and the conference room. For at least some members, it turned out to be something more practical — the chance to actually finish a course they'd been meaning to take for years, because the format finally fit their life instead of asking their life to bend around a travel schedule.
It's also a reminder that "engagement" doesn't look the same for every member. A one-person creamery with no staff to cover for her isn't going to show the same participation pattern as a larger operation that can send someone to every conference, and a membership program built only around events risks looking, on paper, like it's failing exactly the members it's quietly succeeding with.
If that sounds like your own situation — more curious about a course than a conference room right now — the full catalog is on our education page, and course advisors in the Education Committee can help you figure out which one addresses whatever's actually bothering you in your own cave this season. Sometimes that's the whole point of a membership: not a room, just the right course at the right moment, wherever your kitchen table happens to be.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.