Dear Membership Secretaries
You may have noticed some discrepancies in the total number of members reported in September’s Group & Area membership statistics.
The discrepancies relate to the number of members paying the new concessionary rate and those members who have paid life membership.
Concessionary Membership
The total number of members recorded in the “Group membership”, “Area stats for the group” and “Area statistics” sections indicate there are no members in the area/groups paying the reduced (concessionary) membership rate. Unfortunately, the discrepancy has been caused by the change in the naming convention of the old reduced membership rate, now called concessionary membership.
Whilst we carried out the necessary changes and thoroughly tested the CRM system, we failed to identify the impact this would have on the running of the monthly membership reports.
This oversight has resulted in the individual membership types (standard and concessionary) being merged together. Therefore, the number recorded under the section ‘individual’ & ‘joint’ will include members paying the concessional rate.
We appreciate this may be misleading; however there is no negative affect on the total number of members in the two (Individual and Joint) groups.
What’s more, this error is purely a reporting one and does not mean that members paying the old ‘reduced’ rate have been automatically transferred to the standard rate.
Life Membership
The total number of life members recorded in the “Group membership”, “Area stats for the group” and “Area statistics” sections is also inaccurate.
Members paying reduced life membership (individual & joint) have also been merged into the ‘individual’ or ‘joint’ standard rate counts. Therefore, those members listed as Life members are only those members paying the full life membership rate. Again, totals should be unaffected.
We appreciate you rely on accurate membership numbers and apologise for any confusion caused. The rest of the information provided in the report is as usual.
Due to the financial and time cost of producing new membership reports for all areas, we are not able to resupply new reports as a matter of course. The next batch of reports will be corrected. We’re also rigorously testing new-style membership reports which we aim to start sending out from November – we’ll keep you posted on this.
Many thanks,
Iain Johnston.
