A bit of background and some stats.

I feel lucky in that my association has been on a wave of change for several years, giving me an opportunity to (trusting me to) test some of my own marketing, technology and social networking ideas. It is a small association of mental health professionals, which has been in existence in one form or another since 1930. Most recently, it used to be a Society, a Foundation and a training Institute. Five years ago, the membership voted to reorganize the whole kit and caboodle into one Center - mostly for financial reasons, but also based on an understanding that a loose association of individuals was not going to survive as it was, without some sort of more business-like model. The field as a whole had also been experiencing a downturn in society, meaning a distinctly aging membership and lack of a pool of eager new students to put through the training programs. Our long-time, very old-school style executive director retired at that time after 36 years, so the other part of this new organization was to replace her with a much more expensive, but more experienced fundraising/networking/association professional. He has now started a brand new strategic planning process which is still in the planning phase, after two Board retreats. More on that as we go along.

One change in structure was to have ONE main class of membership, instead of many small categories each with their own dues. Within that one class (Active), there would still be subsets (Life members, student members) but way less than before. There would still be two other secondary categories - Corresponding, for those people who are Active members in other similarly affiliated groups, and Honorary, for those people who are important enough to the field that the Board would offer them free membership. Finally, there would be a "Friend" category, for those who were interested in our activities but not quite invested enough yet to pay the $1000 dues. The change in this structure has been very important for the culture of the association, in trying to show that everyone is equal, despite the rigid hierarchies inherent in any medical/health field.

The experiment is still ongoing, so we'll see what happens, but I can report that as of right now we have only had 1 resignation and 1 person switch to "friend" from "active". As of May 31, exactly one year after the changes in membership structure came into effect, we had 19 new friends, 13 new corresponding members, and 1 new active member. Which means that despite a huge rise in dues for those who were subcategories before, almost no-one has dropped out. I'm going to continue to monitor this and will come back to it later.

Finally, just to summarize another major change, we used to have certain programs which fell under either the Society or the Foundation, but with the reorganization, everything is now under the one "Center" umbrella. We have created what we call the Program management Committee, which is where, once per month, the program chairs of each program or activity get together to see what everyone else is up to. New projects or programs or community activities can also be discussed or approved here. So for me, as operations/admin person, this is also the venue where I can attempt to "cross pollinate" ideas from one program to others.

I think this is enough for this post, but basically this should give a very basic background to the organization I am working in.