Ending the year on a member story felt right, and this one isn't about a ribbon or a record export month. It's about a renewal notice that almost didn't get answered.
The member runs a small-batch farmstead operation — a two-person cave, mostly washed-curd and a seasonal blue, sold direct and through one regional distributor. In the fall of 2020, with events canceled and the distributor account cut back to almost nothing, her membership renewal landed in a stack of bills she wasn't sure she could justify. "I remember looking at the invoice and thinking, what am I actually getting for this right now," she told us. "No conference. No workshop I could drive to. It felt like the easiest thing to cut."
She renewed anyway, mostly out of habit, and what she used over the following year surprised her. Not the parts of membership built for a normal year — the in-person workshops, the conference floor — but the parts built specifically for the year she was having. She worked through two online courses she'd been putting off for years because the in-person cohort schedule never lined up with her production calendar. She sat in on a webinar about direct-to-consumer sales that she credits with actually shaping the curbside pickup system she still runs today. And when a labeling question came up that she couldn't find a clear answer to on her own, a call to the Membership & Outreach Committee got her an answer in a week instead of a guess.
What changed her mind about what membership is for
By her account, the shift wasn't dramatic. It was a slow accumulation of small, specific uses that added up to more than the renewal cost, delivered in a format she could actually access without leaving the cave unattended. "I used to think of it as the conference plus everything else," she said. "Now I think of it as everything else, and the conference is the bonus."
That's a version of a pattern we've seen across a lot of small operations this year: virtual delivery didn't just substitute for in-person programming, it reached people who structurally couldn't use the in-person version in the first place — a one-person shop that can't leave the register, a two-person creamery that can't both staff the vat and drive four hours to a workshop. If that's your situation too, you're not the exception the programming was designed around; increasingly, you're closer to the rule.
Heading into a staffing-tight January
She mentioned one more thing worth passing along as the new year starts. Retail and food-production crews everywhere have been describing the same squeeze this month — more callouts, more short shifts, less seasonal help than usual — as a wave of respiratory illness moves through communities over the holidays. She's already planned her January production schedule assuming she might lose a day or two to being short-handed. It's a small piece of planning, but it's the kind of thing a member who almost walked away learns to do — build the cushion in before you need it, not after.
If your own renewal is sitting in a stack you haven't opened yet, take it as this member did: not as a bill for a normal year, but as access to whatever this year actually turns out to need. And if you're not sure what's available to you specifically, the Membership & Outreach Committee would rather field that question in January than lose you to a lapsed notice in March.
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.