Not every member story this year is about a webinar or a credential. Some of them are about a folding table that stayed open when the rules around it kept changing.
The member we're spotlighting this week runs a small farmstead operation in the upper Midwest — a two-person creamery that sells almost entirely through a weekend farmers market and a handful of standing wholesale accounts. Last summer, when foot traffic at the market dried up overnight, she built an online order form in an afternoon so regulars could reserve a wheel and pick it up curbside. This summer the market reopened at something closer to normal, and she kept the order form running anyway.
Why the form stayed
"I figured people would stop using it once they could just walk up to the table again," she told us in a recent check-in call, "and some of them did. But enough people didn't that it's basically a second stand now." She estimates a third of her weekly volume now moves through pre-orders, filled the night before and set aside with a name taped to the lid. It's not a dramatic system — a shared spreadsheet, a few standing customers who order the same wedge every week — but it's one more channel than she had eighteen months ago, and it didn't cost her anything to build.
She's quick to point out it wasn't a smooth build. The first few weeks ran on a paper sign-up sheet at the stand itself, which worked until a rainy Saturday turned it to pulp halfway through the morning. The spreadsheet version came out of that, not out of any grand plan, and she's kept it deliberately low-tech since — no app, no payment processor, just a form, a pickup window, and a name written on tape. "The second I make this complicated," she told us, "is the second I stop wanting to run it."
That kind of quiet resilience is exactly what we've heard from a number of small-creamery members this year. The renewal numbers back it up: retention among farmstead-scale members has held up notably well through a year when a lot of the usual reasons to attend in person — a market day, a competition, a conference hallway conversation — have been unreliable at best. Members built workarounds, and some of those workarounds turned out to be improvements rather than stopgaps, which is a distinction we think matters when we're deciding what to keep recommending going forward.
What she's watching now
Case counts have started climbing again this month as the Delta variant becomes the dominant strain in a growing number of states, and local health guidance is shifting in response even where markets themselves remain open. She's less worried about whether the market stays open than about whether her regulars start feeling cautious about lingering at an outdoor stand the way some of them did last year. The order form, she says, is her insurance policy either way — if people want to grab and go, they can, and if the table stays busy and social the way it's been all July, that's fine too.
She's also started thinking about the pre-order list as something more than a stopgap for a bad week. A handful of the names on it have become close to a subscription — the same order, the same pickup slot, most weeks of the season — and she's wondering out loud whether that's worth formalizing next year rather than leaving it as an ad hoc spreadsheet habit.
If you've built something similar — an order form, a delivery route, a subscription list — we'd like to hear about it. Reply to this post or flag it to our Membership & Outreach Committee; a short list of what's actually working for members this year is more useful to the rest of us than any forecast we could write.
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.