New STC Fee Structure Suspends “Pass-Through” Funding to Chapters
Ars Communica News | Posted October 21st, 2009
Earlier this month, STC announced new membership pricing, featuring an à la carte fee structure. As part of this new structure, members will be charged additional fees for membership in local chapters or SIGs.
This week, STC announced that fees paid for chapter membership would not be passed along to the chapters during the 2010 fiscal year.
The 2010 fee structure is as follows:
Basic Membership $215 USD
Students $75 USD
Retirees $145 USD
Basic dues will not include membership in a chapter or SIG, as they have in past years. Chapter membership will be an additional $25 USD and SIG membership will be an additional $10 USD.
In response to questions posed on various STC-related forums about membership fees, STC posted a list of questions and answers on its web site (original article here). This is a excerpt:
Why has STC dropped the “pass thru” of monies to chapters?
Chapters are not separate entities. They are an integral part of STC and, as such, receive a number of services from the parent organization. The “pass thru” was suspended temporarily for 2010 because of the significant surpluses held in some chapter bank accounts. Chapters were asked to create zero-based budgets for 2010, utilize the surplus funds for 2010 activities, and return the remainder to STC to help resolve the cash flow deficit anticipated for the fourth quarter of 2009. A portion of the returned funds will be set aside to fund chapters that lack sufficient resources for 2010 budgeted activities. The Board is very grateful to the chapters for returning their surplus funds and the collegial support given the leadership during this difficult and stressful period.
Basic dues no longer includes a chapter and SIG. If I pay the extra $25 for a chapter and $10 for a SIG who gets the money?
Chapters and SIGs are an integral part of STC. The money collected is used for their support. STC provides communities with a variety of services, such as legal IRS compliance, liability insurance, payment processing, marketing, sales, advertising, online publications, education (some is free to members), conference planning, negotiation, and management.
Why isn’t the money collected for chapters and SIGs being given to them?
Basically, through 2010, chapters that were struggling financially before The Crisis will receive STC funds. Chapters that had cash will be living on the cash. Each chapter submitted budgets for the last quarter of 2009 and all of 2010 projecting spending, and working with the Society to return money that wasn’t needed during that budget period or to receive money for unfunded needs. These budgets went through (and some are still going through) a Society approval process.
Although the chapter fee remains $25, it is seemingly unrelated to the amount of money that a chapter receives. Funding from the Society is currently needs based. Also, it is unclear whether money flagged as chapter money is necessarily going to be spent directly on chapters. The current thinking is that it is all Society money, which is why the Society felt okay with recapturing money that was largely originally received from members for the chapters. So when a chapter member gives the $25 chapter fee, the chapter may not directly benefit. The indirect benefit would be the vitality of STC as a whole, and the support of struggling sister chapters (perhaps chapters in geographic locations where unemployment is high, for instance) and perhaps SIGs.
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:57 am
Posted by Sean Brierley.
I just went round and round on this on STCideas.ning.com.
It was made pretty clear, after a while, that all the STC money goes into one pot from which chapters are funded. Nobody knows if the chapter fee will be tracked separately but consensus is that all STC money is pooled and chapter fees are not kept separate.
From the discussion on Ning, it also seemed clear that there are three reasons for a member to want to pay the $25 for chapter membership:
1) To take advantage of discounted admission to chapter events, if the chapter charges STCers who are not chapter members more than chapter members.
2) To take advantage of any password-protected chapter content that is available only to chapter members.
3) To be a good STC chapter citizen. It was made clear that a decrease in membership would result in careful scrutiny of chapter budgets. So, if your members say, nevermind, we’ll join the STC and forget the membership fee, and just go to the chapter anyway, then long-term that will, perhaps, hurt the chapter’s ability to get funding.
Cheers,
Sean
October 22nd, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Posted by Ev Larsen.
Merci, Sean. I followed your exchanges on Ning the best I could, and I think you summarized the outcome pretty well. It did take a number of exchanges to get to that outcome, and the overall communication on this issue had been very poor. STC International needs to do a much better job of justifying this dues structure, especially the chapter surcharge, before we can effectively sell the increase to our members.
October 22nd, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Posted by Jim Royal.
A followup thought, Sean, about STC members wanting to be good chapter citizens…
It may not be clear to members (or even to myself) which choice makes for a good citizen from the chapter’s perspective — to pay the fee or not to pay the fee. If the member chooses not to pay the chapter fee, but instead pays an attendance fee at the door, does this not help the chapter more directly?
I think the Society would have simplified thing greatly by doing away with chapter membership entirely, and funding local chapters based on geographical information in the membership database.
October 30th, 2009 at 3:22 am
Posted by Bob Kauten.
I left this comment at Ivan Walsh’s blog, also. He’s quoting the same document.
Just a heads up. The STC Communication which you’ve quoted no longer contains much of the original text. It’s been toned down a lot.
I noticed this today (October 29), when a member of the STC Board of Directors left a comment, expressing unfamiliarity with the quote: “The current thinking is that it is all Society money, which is why the Society felt okay with recapturing money that was largely originally received from members for the chapters.”
(Conversation at http://askbobkauten.com/blog/?p=876)
I looked it up, and the original communication no longer contains that sentence, or the entire topic that contained it. It’s difficult to discuss a communication that is in constant flux.
December 13th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
Posted by Andy Gural.
It is my intention to turn over my membership fee to my chapter directly rather than to the parent body.
Given that HQ has taken the positions that:
• They are under no obligation to explain how they spent our fees and have gotten themselves into a financial black hole that may well end in insolvency for the STC international body
• That even if HQ did show us the books, we would misunderstand the numbers
• That they have suspended the discussion forums so that people could not talk together in one location about this dreadful situation, which, to be fair, was years in the making
• Their insistence that HQ now needs all of our membership fees rather than ‘merely’ 80 per cent of the fees with 20 per cent for the chapters
• That they are refusing to fund the local chapters but even have the gall to add on a chapter administration fee WHEN THEY ARE NOT PLANNING ON FUNDING LOCAL CHAPTERS AT ALL
I am deeply committed to our profession, and our need to band together for mutual education, but ‘the house is on fire, please throw your money on it and we won’t tell you why’ is akin to abuse. I have complete confidence in the leadership of my local chapter and will be turning over my membership fee in full to them at the January meeting.
Andy Gural
Chapter President 2007-2008