AASL Chapters Forum

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Membership in the AASL Chapters Forum is open to all and may include the state-level school library association’s president/chair, other officers, conference chair, etc. Past Delegates and other interested stakeholders from the association may join the forum. This space provides an opportunity to share, discuss and ask questions from chapter colleagues across the country.

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  • 1.  Membership Benefits you offer

    Posted Jan 16, 2014 02:53 PM

    New Jersey Associaltion of School Librarians wants to know what benefits you offer to "members only". How do you provide and promote the benefit of membership?


    Also what membership categories do you have (retired?  student?) and what do you charge?


    Thanks in advance.



  • 2.  RE: Membership Benefits you offer

    Posted Jan 16, 2014 03:07 PM
    Hi, Hilda -
    Our members receive access to the Members Only area of our website which includes a supplemental materials archive from prior conferences and professional development opportunities.  Also, they have access to the subscription e-list forum for engaging in conversation with fellow members.  For many, though, one of the nicest benefit is deeply discounted rates for both our annual conference and summer professional development opportunities.

    Information on our levels of membership, including rates, can be found on our website at this link: http://www.tasltn.org/membership-2014

    Hope this is of benefit to you.

    Best,

    Mona






    On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 2:55 PM, ALA Connect <connect@ala.org> wrote:


  • 3.  RE: Membership Benefits you offer

    Posted Jan 23, 2014 09:49 AM

    NY struggles with this all the time…..we want to promote what we do but if everything we do is available for "free" hard to justify (with some) the advantages of joining.   We are transitioning to a "free" newsletter on our website, lots of advocacy tools on our website, BUT making the "fee based" events have a discrepancy between member/non.   Likewise, we are working on advocacy tools that promote the responsibility of membership, professional associations, and leadership.   Personally I think the decisions to join or not comes down to a person's intrinsic sense of "duty" to do so and often hard to shift the way people decide.   Our job is  to make it hard to say "NO" !   Do share any updates/views that have increased membership…always our goal.  Thanks, Sue Kowalski



  • 4.  RE: Membership Benefits you offer

    Posted Jan 28, 2014 10:40 AM

    We have struggled with this question. Currently:

    • You can only receive the list of members if you are a member
    • We also have scholarships and awards that are available to members only
    • Conference registration is less expensive if you are a member (we have looked at the model our state technology organization uses which is: higher conference fee that includes the price of membership)

    Everything else is free to whoever visits our site. We would like to offer more that is member only for added benefit of membership, but find it expensive to create a member only "locked" area on a website. We found that when we had a link we distributed to members (say Google docs), people would still pass that on to non-members. So. We decided to stop fighting that trend and simply open things up. Hopefully those non-members that use our site will see the good things we do, and opt to join.