NEC Meeting, Membership Decline

[SarDragon]

[redacted]  I do not think we are having retention problems, [redacted]

If losing 50% of our new members every year isn't a retention problem, then what is? Discuss.

I am not exactly sure where the "50% of our new members" is coming from.  Please site your source on that one.

But to speak on the numbers I have researched in my region alone, we loose roughly 50-60% of cadets and 15-18% of senior memebers every year.  There is no way of isolating whether those are new or "seasoned" members, just people who did not renew.  As far as the cadets are concened, I am more likely to believe they are the newest cadet members who are not renewing.

I can assume with a significant amount of certainty that these numbers aren't far off the national average.  In fact, I'd bet that they may be a little better than the national average.

As far as recruiting; I don't think that CAP has the capability at present to increase recruiting enough to show a gain in total membership over these losses.  We would have to increase recruiting by at least 45% to show a measurable increase.

As stated previously, these statistics were given out at various wing conferences. Specific statistics from NHQ used to be available online, but I can't find them any more. The retention numbers were given for CAP overall, and for first-year retention. The 50% may have been just the cadet side, but I can't get at the figures.

If we can retain half of the members that don't renew at the end of their first, CAP would show a growth every year. I'm not too concerned about specific percentages, but just getting the annual change on the plus side.

[Al Sayre]

Does anyone know why we haven't gotten the AOPA as a corporate partner?  We have EAA and a couple of other pilot organizations as partners.  This seems like something that should be addressed by national.  After all, it is the largest group of pilots in the the US, and is also fertile recruiting ground.  They have similar goals as far as safety etc., and provide many good aviation resources for their members.  It's also one of the first groups new pilots and those who are interested in aviation join.  A link from their website to ours and a mention in their magazines could go a long way towards the recruiting goals.