A member called our office last week to ask, a little sheepishly, whether her membership had already lapsed. It hadn't yet — she had about ten days left on the clock — but she hadn't opened the renewal notice, hadn't logged into the portal since spring, and couldn't immediately remember the last time she'd used anything the federation offers. We're not naming her here, at her request, but the shape of her year is worth describing because it isn't unusual, and because it's a shape our retention numbers don't always catch until it's too late to do anything but send another reminder.
She runs a two-person creamery that spent most of 2020 and the first half of 2021 figuring out direct-to-consumer sales, cold-chain shipping, and a website nobody on staff had built before. That kind of pivot has been common across small producers this cycle — industry coverage this year has pointed to steady growth in specialty cheese sales even as foodservice accounts lagged, which tracks with what we've heard from members leaning harder on their own storefronts and mailing lists than on restaurant orders. None of that required the federation. She wasn't in a course, wasn't on a committee, hadn't registered for a webinar since winter. Membership renewed itself quietly every year on autopay, and quietly stopped being something she thought about at all.
What almost let it go
"It wasn't that I decided the federation wasn't worth it," she told us. "It's that I genuinely forgot it was a decision I was supposed to be making." That's a harder problem for us to solve than active dissatisfaction. A member who's frustrated tells you what's wrong. A member who's just quietly busy doesn't tell you anything, and from where we sit the renewal notice looks the same going out to her as it does going out to someone about to let it lapse on purpose. Our own systems can't tell the difference between "too busy to notice" and "deciding to walk away" — both look, from the outside, like a member who has stopped opening email.
What brought her back wasn't a discount or a reminder email — she'd gotten three of those and skimmed past all of them. It was a phone call from a volunteer who'd noticed her course activity had gone flat and asked, plainly, whether anything had changed. It hadn't; she was just underwater. The call reminded her the label rule she'd been meaning to check, the one that changed for direct-shippers earlier this year, was sitting in an archived webinar she'd never watched.
What we're taking from this
If your year looks like hers — heads-down on the business side, membership on autopay, portal login you can't quite place — you're not the member we worry about least. You're often the one doing the most interesting work, just without time to tell us about it. Our Membership & Outreach Committee is expanding the kind of check-in call that reached her, specifically for members whose activity has gone quiet without an obvious complaint behind it. It's a slower way to find out who's drifting than an automated email sequence, but it's the only method so far that's actually brought someone back mid-lapse rather than after the fact. If you'd rather we called than emailed, say so on your next renewal, and we'll make a note. And if you're the one who's gone quiet this fall, you don't have to wait for our volunteer to reach you first — the portal login problem is usually a five-minute fix, and the membership desk would rather hear from you directly.
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.