SSA Membership Growing

This is very carefully tracked by the office and is not a magazine
count guess. There is steady, but real progress being made here through
a lot of hard work.
UH

Using the publicly available database of airman certificates from the
FAA for Jan 2006, and recognizing that some pilots have invoked privacy
and are not in the public list, I find

19014 glider pilots with private glider ratings (though 1420 ratings
based on foreign ratings, a few are duplicated, holding commercial and
CFIG)
12772 glider pilots with a commercial rating
3041 glider pilots with a CFIG rating, however there are 6029 listed
with both commercial AND CFIG, so there are between 9731 and 9767 with
commercial as the highest rating. There are a pilots listed with
foreign private and US commercial to further complicate the queries and
my time is a bit limited to fiddle with this.

Assuming the GAMA numbers are accurate WRT the private only ratings,
about 10% appear to have invoked the privacy option. Assuming that
holds across ratings, I get approximately

19014+9749+3041=31804*1.1=34984 which appears higher than estimates of
five years ago. The number is probably somewhat lower, but in the ball
park.

Frank Whiteley

Hank,

How much did the termination of the club rebates impact renewals for
2006?

Andy

Andy wrote:
Hank,

How much did the termination of the club rebates impact renewals for
2006?

I suspect that's a little early to tell. It's certainly making my club
examine other insurance options so that members would not have to belong
to the SSA. The SSA made a mistake here, IMHO.

Tony V.
http://home.comcast.net/~verhulst/SOARING

Probably too early to tell.
From what I know about our club, it is not an issue.
Biggest issue with clubs and chapters has been cleaning up the renewal
process.
UH

Keeping with the new SSA policy on transparency, that would be cleaning
it up at both the clubs' and Hobbs' end of the process.

Since the rebate termination decision was taken, it's become clear that
the full impact wasn't known. Since then, one club has stated that it
required SSA membership of some 60 inactive club members to retain that
inactive status. I heard about another club that might have 20-30
members in that status and I believe there may be another here in
Colorado that does the same. My club doesn't require this at present,
though it might be a good idea to do so. Indeed, I would like the SSA
Clubs & Chapters Committee to recommend this as an SSA chapter 'best
practice'.

No one knows what the impact may be should chapters decide to drop the
SSA requirement of inactive members, but it could range into the
hundreds, which would undo the efforts of the past three years pretty
quickly.

Frank Whiteley

Frank Whiteley wrote:

No one knows what the impact may be should chapters decide to drop the
SSA requirement of inactive members, but it could range into the
hundreds, which would undo the efforts of the past three years pretty
quickly.

My take on the efforts is to increase the number of active SSA members,
so losing inactive memberships wouldn't undo this. It would make the
membership total look worse, but if it can be traced to losing members
that aren't contributing and don't really want to be members, I suggest
it's acceptable.


--
Change "netto" to "net" to email me directly

Eric Greenwell
Washington State
USA

I suggest that may be short-sighted.

There are already a considerable number of SSA members that are in a
supportive role and not actively flying, nor associated with any clubs.
We've already determined this. Keeping the magazine in front of them
is quite important and may inspire several to become active again.
Many track old friends this way and that's a form of active interest.

Secondly, they may pass along Soaring to someone who shows some
interest in flight who'll become a future member.

Clubs and chapters of course must also provide some value added aspect
that would hold an inactive member's interest. We have some associate
members and newsletter recipients that suggest the interest is there.

Frank Whiteley