This fall, a longtime member on our Membership & Outreach Committee asked for something unusual: a list of accounts that hadn't opened a newsletter, logged into a course, or answered a renewal reminder since spring. Not lapsed members, exactly — most of them were still current, dues paid, nothing technically wrong. Just quiet in a way our engagement reports don't have a category for. She wanted to call them, one at a time, and ask how they were doing before anyone asked them to renew anything.
We get a version of this suggestion every few years, usually framed as a retention tactic, and we usually say the phone calls are a nice idea that nobody has time to actually make. This time we said yes, partly because the year gave us little else to offer members who were struggling, and partly because she was the one offering to make the calls herself, on her own evenings, between running her own creamery's skeleton crew.
What the calls turned up
She got through about forty of them over six weeks. A handful were straightforward: an email address had changed, or someone was simply too busy with a curbside operation to open a newsletter and didn't need anything from us beyond that. But a larger group told a version of the same story — a slow year, a business running leaner than it had in a decade, and a quiet sense of being cut off from the rest of the industry now that there was no conference floor or workshop room to run into anyone. Several said flatly that nobody outside their own four walls had asked how the year was going. A membership newsletter, it turns out, doesn't feel like being asked.
None of this is a surprise if you've read anything about small-business stress this year — surveys of owners have found a large majority reporting real strain on their mental health, and isolation is consistently named as one of the sharper edges of it, worse for people running a business alone than for people with a staff to talk to. Our volunteer didn't set out to run a wellness check. She set out to understand why a batch of accounts had gone dark. What she found was that the two questions were closer together than we'd assumed.
What we changed because of it
We didn't turn this into a formal program, and we're wary of promising more calls than we can actually make good on. But we did ask her to write up what worked, and the short version is: lead with a real question about the person's year, not the account status, and be willing to sit through an answer that has nothing to do with membership at all. A few of the members she called ended up back in a course or a committee within a month. Most didn't, and that was fine — she wasn't calling to sell anything.
If you've been quiet yourself this year, you don't need a phone call from us to reach out. The Membership & Outreach Committee takes calls the other direction too, and a five-minute conversation about how your season actually went is a better use of anyone's time than another unopened email.
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.