Author Archives: Nancy

MPP and dual members

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The Membership Pilot Program (MPP) is what AAUW calls its initial step towards national dues collection. The odd name probably comes from the emphasis on this being an optional program — branches can still collect dues locally and send the checks to DC just as they’ve been doing for years.

The MPP (live 5/1/09) provides two major benefits:

  • Renewing branch members can pay dues onlne at aauw.org with a credit card. [Some branches have allowed online payments for years, often using Paypal. Note, however, that AAUW picks up all the credit card transaction fees with the MPP.]
  • Branch treasurers who collect dues locally can remit the state/national portion with an online payment at aauw.org. No checks, no stamps, no envelopes, no muss, no fuss – and a member shows up as renewed on the aauw.org roster as soon as the transaction is completed.

In my branches, very few members (just one, count ’em) are taking advantage of the online payment, but as a branch treasurer, I love the convenience of the online reporting and payment.

There are some odd quirks, though. Some are due to AAUW’s inconsistent treatment of dual members, i.e. members who join more than one branch. They are “primary” members of their first branch and “dual” members of other branches. They pay national dues just once, and state dues just once to each state. This is an important enough concept that it’s been in the c. 20 word glossary provided to new members, but in some contexts, AAUW members have been known to say “dual members are a local issue.”

I just handled my first dual member joining the branch and paying branch dues (my branch had $0 local dues until July 1). She wrote the branch a check for $5, and I’ll deposit that sometime soon. However, I wanted to get her connected right away, so I went to the MPP and signed her up. Now, at some level, I knew this was going to happen but it still seems odd:

  • AAUW charged the branch credit card the amount of the local dues
  • Sometime this month AAUW will send the local dues back to the branch checking account via electronic funds transfer

When a member is paying national/state/local dues, it seemed odd but not completely ridiculous to send the total amount to the national organization and then get the rebate of the local portion (at the same time, I suppose, that the state was sent their cut). But when someone owes only local dues, to have that local amount make a lonely round trip to national and back seems nuts. And it must be relatively expensive to pay two transaction fees on such a small amount.

The charitable argument for this (don’t ask me about the uncharitable ones) was that “we must process the entire transaction so that we can confirm it.”  I’d argued against that since it required some dissembling in cases where the branch would, say, offer a discount to a graduate student — the person didn’t pay the entire amount, but the transaction was being processed as if she had. I lost that battle.

Anyway, I’m glad for the  MPP for what it is, and hope that “real” national dues collection (with the national organization crafting invoices that say payment is to be returned to them, not the local branch treasurer) will be in our future soon — after enough branches get confidence that the money that’s sent to DC really will come back to them in a timely fashion. [Perhaps that’s the real argument for this process, but then there’s a chicken and egg question: branches won’t sign up for the pilot program because of lack of confidence, so how can confidence be built?]

Comment here (change.bbvx.org) or on Facebook ….

Required reading

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Okay, I’ve avoided all you folks who participate in the Facebook Virtual Bookshelf and manage to read/review several books a month. And I’m late to this book whose author gave the keynote at 09NTC. But now I’m on board and am recommending this to everyone who belongs to any kind of group!

Clay Shirky’s 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody: The power of organizing without organizations, is chock full of insights on how the social media revolution (and it is a revolution he compares to the printing press) is changing the world. If you care about community organizations, then whether you consider this change good, bad,or  indifferent, it’s not something that you can ignore, and Shirky provides new ways to frame the change that can help evaluate how your organization is adapting (or not).

Bowling Alone was the first selection on the organizational change AAUW 2008 reading list. That 2000 work from  Robert Putnam discussed how organizations have changed in the last 100 (especially the last 50) years and how important they are to the health of communities. Shirky’s book describes how bowlers aren’t really alone — they just no longer need leagues. It takes the “did you know” anomalies and explains how “cyberspace” isn’t really a separate “space” anymore — it’s a part of “real life” and organizations that don’t understand how their stakeholders can self organize are at risk.

I’ll admit that parts of it resonated with me in ways that may seem odd to those who haven’t lived in the ‘net connected, open source world since the early 80’s. The new AAUW “entities” [cf. Article XII] seem like natural alternatives to the community-based branches to me — but I am getting pushback, and I’ve no idea if the three or four ideas I’ve already thrown out will “catch.” It’ll be interesting to see if the “organizers” of the new AAUW leader corps will consider different models and if different kinds of  “communities” will grow when the right promise/tool/bargain is found. [We’ve already got cheap failures like the dust bowls of  wiki.bbvx.org and the majority of AAUW Facebook groups.]

So read the book. Or at least take an hour to watch the NTEN conference keynote or check out Shirky’s other writings.

Thanks, all.

What a difference two years makes!

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Only about 1% of the AAUW members ever attend convention, but many more are extremely interested in what happens.  As someone who’s been on communications teams at the branch and state level, I’ve been passionate about getting information out “to the folks back home” since my first convention in 1999. At first (1999, 2001), I was concerned about posting information of my personal activities (e.g. IT 2001 campaign), but then I started documenting the North Carolina delegation (2003, 2005, 2007). Those were mostly posts I did from my room after all the events were over.

In 2007, in response to the culture change to have more information immediately available, we also tried using twitter to get information out from the floor of the convention. Louse (@weegspin), Kate (@skeggy), and I (@nes49) were pretty much shouting into the void, though — there was no real way to get the word out to the members that another information stream existed. See the report on that experiment.

This year, however, there was a rich “twitter stream” on all aspects of the convention. Staff and members both contributed, and while there was limited “conversation” with the folks back home, at least the word got out to many who were able to follow along. See the transcript.

What changed? Here’s my list:

  1. Facebook happened. In the spring of 2007 a student from Alabama had started the first (and still the largest) AAUW Facebook group. After the 2007 convention, a second group was started by students from Illinois Iowa to help unite the younger members.  Starting in the fall of 2007, Facebook started attracting the “not so younger” members who were able to find each other, and they started conversations on how to use Facebook to advance the mission. The 2009 convention itself had a group.
  2. AAUW started a blog in early 2008. The staff’s use of “web 2.0” technology to raise awareness and support conversations legitimized the use of “putting unfiltered information into the public domain” in addition to the tightly controlled e-mail lists and the properly more formal research reports and www.aauw.org in general.
  3. In late 2008, AAUW committed to sponsor the Feminism 2.0 conference, and that conference in February, 2009, demonstrated the possibilities of both blogging and micro-blogging to forge connections and build support for a wide range of issues on the feminist agenda.
  4. So by June 2009, we had folks with blogs, facebook profiles, twitter, flickr and more who were ready to report back to the members at home about all that was going on. More than that, they could find each other and share photos, comments, and updates. I don’t know all that went into the staff’s decision not to publish a daily “newspaper” about the convention — but I think the coverage was pretty good without that extremely labor intensive project. Of course we’re still using e-mail lists and other tools to gather information for state newsletters and web sites, and more will be coming out in the next few weeks. But I think we did a credible job of getting the flavor of convention to those who couldn’t attend but were engaged enough to follow the information stream.

Again, I’m just seeing part of the elephant, but I have to give credit to Linda Hallman who took over as ED in January 2008 for supporting a culture that allowed this experimentation by the staff. Thanks, of course, to all the staff members and volunteers who participated. After such a big disappointment with twitter in 2007, this 2009 information sharing has been great.

I wonder what things will look like in 2011…

Twitter tools #aauw09

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There are fewer than 1000 members who will be attending the AAUW convention in St. Louis this weekend — but the interest around the country is amazing. So some of us are planning to tweet, blog, post on Facebook, and otherwise get the word out as the convention evolves.

I’ll be traveling with my trusty laptop — this is old faithful’s fourth convention (knock wood). [See posts from 2003, 2005 and 2007.] But because Internet connectivity at convention is limited, I won’t be lugging that with me during the day — no e-mail or web (or Facebook), but I will have twitter.

On twitter we’re using the “hashtag” #aauw09, and folks at home can follow that at

If you want to post a comment or a question from home, some of us will be “listening” for that. You can post general comments to the #aauw09 twitter stream, but you can also send targeted messages (use “D <twittername>”) to reach a particular person. No promises, of course — there will be times when phones are turned off and we’re concentrating on the interactions with the wonderful members we see once every two years. But it may be a way to reach out to convention attendees and add your voice to the conversation.  You may just want to ues e-mail or Facebook to post your comments — some people will be staying in touch all day, and others will pick up those messages over night.

If you’re going to be in St. Louis and will depend on your phone for access, you have lots of options if you’ve entered the age of the “smart” phone. But if, like me, text messaging is the limit of your phone connectivity, how do you follow the #aauw09 conversation from the floor of the convention? Again, you may not want to keep up with all of that — but I’m exploring some options and if you have a suggestion, let me know. If any of my experiments pan out, I’ll let y’all know what I’m using.

How to learn to listen?

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We had an interesting dinner at my house last night — did get the required two contacts elected for next year.

But…

Let’s define “hard core member” as “life member or someone who has served on the state or national board in the last 10 years”

At the meeting we had

  • 10 hard core (2 who met both criteria)
  • 2 others

In the branch we have

  • 15 hard core
  • 20 others

So we’re facing not just the challenge that AAUW is so many different things to different people, but also that the group that coalesces to make decisions about the branch may share some underlying assumptions that may not have been articulated to the members who are new or who aren’t active.

Personally, I’m making my bet on the Tar Heel Branch, but there are those who want the community-based branch to succeed. If you have strategies, surveys, or other ways to elicit “what do branch members want” from the silent majority of members, do pass them along.