It has now been one year since the last election and in Ottawa Centre we've had a higher than average number of members slip into "lapsed" status in the last thirty days.  I've been tracking the rate of new, renewed and lapsed members over time - some months are net improvements and some are not.  Obviously this cohort of lapsing members is entirely related to the election - they are Green supporters who were motivated by the election to donate and chose to become members as well.  Without the excitement of an election we are losing them (as members anyway).  I'm sure this is a phenomenon we share with all the other parties.

One pillar of our future success in Parliament is our membership base.  Bigger is better.  So finding a way to retain election spawned memberships is important as a long term strategy.

I'm going to lay out one idea I've had for mobilizing the current members in Ottawa Centre to help renew the lapsed members.  I'm hoping to collect some feedback on this proposal, or new (or recycled) ideas entirely.  To the proposal...

Neighbourhood Member Mobilization

Members that have lapsed have already been contacted several times by email from the National Office.  So sending one more is unlikely to make a big difference.  Calling a member might work - but I ignore calls from numbers I don't recognize and a voice mail is also easy to dismiss.  Sending a letter might be effective - but that will cost a few real dollars for paper and postage, and there is the opportunity cost of not having the EDA executive focus on something else.  So let's leverage the local membership instead...

What if, for every lapsed member, we could find out which current member lives the closest and ask them to help?  I wrote up a program that would do that and in Ottawa Centre some members live on the same street (literally doors away) and in most cases are as close as a few streets away.  What I'm proposing is to send these "closest current" members an email like this (which is auto-generated):

Hi FIRST_NAME,

I'm trying to reach out to all of our lapsed members in Ottawa Centre to encourage them to renew and I was hoping you could help me. There are XXXX to contact (too many for me to do on my own) but I've found that you live the closest to 1 of them.

Could you spare a few minutes to phone them and also drop a personal note in their mailbox? Who knows - this might be a chance to meet a new neighbour with whom you share common interests!

If you can help please email me back and I'll provide you with the contact information. To protect everyone's privacy I didn't include the other member's personal information in this email, but you can click on the link to see how close they live to you (based on just postal code).

Directions from your address to K2A 2V2

Email me back if you'd like to help with this membership project. There's another Green Party member close to you who's just waiting to be reached out to!

If the member is willing to help then there is a second email that is ready to be sent that has all of the required details of the lapsed member: name, email, phone, address.  I would also attach a PDF they could print and leave in the mailbox - with a blank area where they could hand write a personal note.

Question: Do you think a member would want to help in this way?  Is there a better way to make the ask?

Question: Is sharing this information appropriate?  Clearly the current member (now a volunteer) would not have signed the membership list agreement - but they aren't getting the entire list.  At most they would get the details on a few lapsed members.  I'm also wondering if there might be some members who don't want to be "outed" as a Green - especially to someone in their neighbourhood.  I would like to think two Greens who live a few streets apart would be happy (ecstatic even!) find eachother but that might not hold universally.

The cost of this little project is pretty low:

• Write a program to assign lapsed members to current members based on location, prepare two messages to the current members.  Send the first email automatically.  Send the second message to myself so it's in my inbox.
• Respond to current members who replied and would like to help.  Find the appropriate message in my inbox and forward it to them.
• Watch the members and money roll in!

Thoughts?

I'm targetting the second week of November to move forward with this.   Should I?  Shouldn't I?  If there are any other EDAs that would like to participate I'd be happy to run your membership list through the program too.  There will be kinks to work out - but who knows - if this is successful perhaps it's something we can get the Federal Council to support so that our awesome IT folks can get a budget to implement this as a feature of civiCRM.