Last Wednesday, Scott Yonally, N8SY, the Great Lakes Division director, addressed our club, ARROW, via Zoom. Scott pretty much stuck to the facts and managed to avoid any controversial issues. There was one statistic that really jumped out at me though.
One of Scott’s slides pointed out that there are 751,233 licensed radio amateurs in the FCC database and only 145,133 ARRL members. My calculator says that means that only 19.3% of licensed radio amateurs are also ARRL members. As you know, if you’ve read my blog over the years, I keep track of this number, and this is the first time that the number has fallen below 20%!
We all know that the ARRL is having membership problems, but I didn’t realize that it was this bad. According to the 2022 annual report—the 2023 annual report has yet to be released—ARRL membership was close to 152,000. That’s a drop of nearly 5% in less than two years! Even if you allow for 50% of those in the FCC database being either inactive or SK, that’s still not even close to 50% of active, licensed amateurs being ARRL members.
As a point of comparison, Fabian Kurz, DJ5CW, recently posted on Mastodon membership figures for DARC, the German equivalent of the ARRL. He noted that there were approximately 31,000 DARC members at the end of last year. I asked if he knew how many licensees there were in Germany, and he replied that there were 60,736 individual licenses on Dec 31, 2023. You do the math. More than 50% of licensees in Germany are also DARC members!
What’s the ARRL doing about membership?
After gathering this data, I asked Yonally in an email, what the ARRL was doing to increase membership? In his talk, he pointed to the new, free student membership, and the increased club commissions. These are good programs, but overall, I don’t think that they’re going to increase ARRL membership much, if at all.
I told Yonally that from my point of view, membership should be the staff’s first priority. If ARRL membership continues to decline, we might as well just close up shop right now. I keep my ear pretty much close to the ground when it comes to social media, and the ARRL isn’t getting a lot of positives strokes. One of the most common things I hear is, “I’m not planning to renew.”
It makes me wonder if the ARRL has just given up on increasing membership. In 2008, the ARRL made a big deal out of hiring a membership manager. And, as recently as 2019, the 2018 annual report noted that membership dropped less than forecast. The report said, “ARRL Membership Manager Diane Petrilli, KB1RNF, and a small group of ARRL staffers are working with marketing agency Mintz + Hoke to help formulate future strategy for increasing and maintaining membership.”
Fast forward to 2023, and the only mention of membership in the 2022 annual report is the chart shown below. There was no explanation at all.
I’d like to know what happened to the 2018/2019 strategy. Ms. Petrilli left the ARRL in 2021, and is now working for the Gerontological Society of America. I searched the ARRL website and cannot find anyone with the title of Membership Manager, so I’m wondering who at HQ is now responsible for increasing membership? I also wonder what the 2023 annual report will have to say about membership.
What role do clubs play?
When I pressed Yonally on this lack of membership strategy, what I got back was kind of confusing. He sent me a bunch of replies to a poll he conducted as to why hams don’t belong to local clubs. The laundry list of complaints was nothing new—we all know that there are many clubs that aren’t run very well—but I couldn’t figure out how that related to ARRL membership.
Further down was his answer to my question about what the ARRL is doing to increase membership:
My answer is simple… YOU are the ARRL. ARRL is a member-based organization. We are ALL responsible for increasing the numbers.
In other words, the ARRL has no membership strategy, or at least none that Yonally is aware of.
If the ARRL is relying on clubs and individual members to boost membership, then we are truly screwed. It’s a lot of work just keeping a local club going and most of them aren’t going to have the bandwidth or motivation to also recruit ARRL members. Aside from a few bucks that they might get from the commission program, clubs have no incentive for recruiting ARRL members.
It’s the ARRL’s responsibility to recruit ARRL members, not the local clubs. Only the ARRL can figure out what benefits it can offer radio amateurs to recruit and retain them as members. I advised Yonally not to waste his time trying to get clubs to do something that they are ill-equipped and not really motivated to do.
Set a target
As I said earlier, I really think that increasing membership should be the ARRL’s top priority. Just think of all the cool things they could do if 50% of the licensed amateurs in the U.S. were ARRL members.
If DARC can hit 50%, I think that the ARRL can get to 25%. This is a membership target that I’ve been suggesting for many years. Let’s get started on this today.
Login
Last Wednesday, Scott Yonally, N8SY, the Great Lakes Division director, addressed our club, ARROW, via Zoom. Scott pretty much stuck to the facts and managed to avoid any controversial issues. There was one statistic that really jumped out at me though.
