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.
Dan, the US figures might be slightly skewed because a substantial number of international hams also do hold a US license ( as I do as KD6KW). Most of them are members in their home country’s organization, and do not see enough benefit of also being an ARRL member….
Unsurprisingly, ARRL is behind the times.
Querying the amateur radio tables in the FCC ULS, looking at *active* licenses of individuals (excluding clubs), as of yesterday, there are not 751,233 licensed amateurs, there are actually 835,810 active licensed amateurs.
That means the arrl actually only has 17.3% penetration into the market.
Given the troubling controversies at HQ, the loss of QST as a print magazine and the lack of a clear focus for the league as a whole, I’m “taking a break” from my 18 years of ARRL membership.
They could earn my renewal back at a later date but it is going to take some serious organizational changes that I am hopeful (but doubtful) will happen. I’m guessing I’m not the only one thinking this way. I wouldn’t be surprised to see 1/3 or more current members fall off the rolls in the next year.
What if the ARRL had a close look at the DARC and see what they are doing right? The ARRL does not have to reinvent the ball as sometimes the answer is looking at you in the face! In this case, the DARC has a good working model and maybe have a look at that?
73,
Mike
VE9KK
Wayne Green would be proud of you..
It’s pointless to set any sort of target membership percentage. This is not a numbers or recruitment problem, it’s a value and relevance problem. I can get amateur radio news and technical information from other organizations and sources these days, without ARRL’s political drama du jour, its mentality that everything we do needs to showcase and justify the existence of amateur radio, and its cumbersome and archaic leadership hierarchy.
1. You get members by have a compelling program, so program and value has to come first. “Build it and they will come” is a movie plot, but it is basically true for volunteer organizations.
2. All clubs in Germany are chartered by DARC, so every radio club member in Germany is a DARC member.. That is how you get to 50%.
Map and list of DARC clubs by district (translated to English): https://www-darc-de.translate.goog/der-club/distrikte/?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp
Your blog highlights an important factor and pertinent points of view, including those in these Comments.
It is very possibly in the nature of the beast that the ARRL, or any other organisation lags a little behind a forefront of experience and opinion, after all the organisation has to take into account the broad swathe of wants and opinions. But this is not a reason for not attracting, or keeping members,
So, the ARRL has stopped sending a paper copy of QST! How disappointing. Previously I have enjoyed reading QST when copies came up in club junksales, I subscribe to three other paper journals, plus the G-QRP *Sprat’ and these keep me relatively updated about activities and contact. However the two, or is it three journals that i have an electronic subcription to do not enthrall nearly as much, the tech content is good and interesting but in toto these don’t interest me as much, and i’m often an issue or two behind with my downloads.
I would also make an observation on how the quality of technical content in QST has fallen markedly off since the last century.
Is it that the Yonally/ARRL opinion “You are the ARRL—— etc.” and your opiniion that something has to change, equally valid. My membership in two national leagues pluss more local clubs is based on these two unopposing points of view. Local, ground based membership has the more immediate effect in recruiting, and benefits, needs national advice, campaigns, and backing to carry them through.
One way we try to influence students on our training course, (it’s for a full – extra license only) is to bake membership of the national society and our local group/club for a year into the course fee. Another is to try and have suitable social events just after the exam taking, and at fairly regular intervals thereafter as well as more regular technical get-togethers at twice a month.
As we attract students from across the country to our course the social events are very challenging, and almost only attended by locals.
Identifying a problem is the first step in altering/correcting that situation.
Attracting, and KEEPING new radio amatuers – members is a task for all of us to find ways of pulling together for.
I have been a DARC member since 1972 and have seen the membership decline since the 1990s. When I got a member, more than 80% of all licensed hams in DL were members.
Part of the decline certainly is the result of demographics and other general developments like the Web and social media. Nearly all private societies suffer from this trend.
The other question is the motivation to be a member. The respective people, ham or not, simply want some benefit for their money. In my view DARC does a quite bad job in this respect by publishing its magazine without qualified and perhaps not enough staff.
cqDL is the single thing that all members get once a month. Everything else in optional. I hear many complaints like “you need to be an engineer to understand too many articles” or “I am not interested in decades old technology”.
As a professional writer I see lots of weaknesses that the editors are responsible for like no prefaces on articles, pictures were you can see next to nothing or holes in the contents – which explains quite often why the readers only understand “main station” as we say in German. Their other publications by the same team are often even worse like their weekly broadcast – see https://www.dl4no.de/beispiel/leitfaden_rundspruch_meldungen.htm (I hope automatic translation brings over my points). I tried to lobby for an educated journalist as chief editor. They hit the messenger and did not act on the problems.
There is a single argument why I have not left DARC: The lobby work DARC does is not that bad. In pluralistic societies the membership size is very important. License holders without DARC membership simply ignore this important fact, but benefit from this work.