Every new membership that comes through our doors gets a welcome packet, a login, and — if a particular volunteer on the Membership & Outreach Committee has anything to say about it — a phone call within the first thirty days. This member, a longtime quality manager at a mid-sized creamery who joined the committee two seasons ago, started making the calls informally, then asked if the committee could make it official policy for anyone who opts in. It has.
"Most new members never open the packet past the first page," they told us. "A call catches the ones who would've quietly figured out membership wasn't for them before they figured out what it actually offers."
Association research on new-member engagement backs up the instinct behind it. One recent industry piece on onboarding found that traditional welcome packets have fallen out of favor over the last several years, with far fewer associations relying on them as the sole introduction to membership, even as a personal phone call remains one of the more effective tools smaller organizations have for making a new member feel actually seen rather than processed. The tricky part, the same research notes, is that a phone-based approach gets harder to sustain as membership grows — which is exactly the tension this volunteer is now working through with the committee.
What the calls actually ask
The conversation isn't a sales pitch. It's closer to a short interview: what kind of operation are you running, what's actually eating your time this quarter, and which of our courses or committees might be worth a look given that. A first-year cheesemonger gets pointed toward the Certified Cheesemonger track. A farmstead producer wrestling with a new labeling question gets steered toward the Food Safety Committee's guidance rather than left to guess. It's less about upselling the membership and more about making sure a new member's first real interaction with the federation is useful rather than generic.
The volunteer says the biggest surprise has been how often the call reveals a need nobody would have guessed from an application form. A new member who signed up expecting a discount on lab testing turned out to be far more interested in the Awards & Competition Committee's entry calendar once she learned it existed. Another spent the first ten minutes of the call convinced membership was mostly about supplier discounts, and left it planning to enroll in a course the following month. None of that shows up on a membership application. It only shows up in a conversation.
The volunteer estimates they've made somewhere over a hundred of these calls since starting, tracked in a spreadsheet that has slowly turned into an informal map of what new members in different regions and specialties tend to need first. That map has already shaped one committee recommendation: a shorter, more targeted onboarding email sequence aimed at retail-side members specifically, since the current one leans heavily toward production topics that don't always apply to a counter clerk or shop owner.
What it takes to keep doing it
Thirty minutes a call, a handful of calls a week during the summer membership push, done around a full-time job running a quality program — it isn't a small commitment, and the volunteer is candid that some weeks it slips. What keeps them at it, they said, is hearing back from a member six months later who mentions a course or a committee they found because of that first call.
If you joined recently and haven't heard from anyone yet, or if you'd like to volunteer for outreach calls yourself, reach out to the Membership & Outreach Committee through the member portal. New volunteers are always welcome, especially heading into the busier second half of the year.
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.