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The American Bar Association is considering testing direct mail and telephone scripts that strongly encourage credit card payment to boost membership renewal rates.

The ABA is the largest volunteer professional association in the country, with about 400,000 members, including 300,000 attorneys. Lawyers are offered a free one-year membership when they pass the bar exam. After the first year, when payment is requested, retention is about 40%.

Membership levels are crucial, said Roger Marcus, the ABA's director of database marketing, at the Chicago Association of Direct Marketing's DM Days last month.

“We're a major lobbying organization,” he said, adding that the association needs about 15,000 new members annually to meet recruitment goals. “The more people we have, the more important we look.”

Marcus said the ABA's main recruitment tool is telemarketing, and that as a nonprofit, the group is exempt from many do-not-call regulations.

The association will take a sale without up-front payment, asking for a credit card number on the phone first, then offering to send a bill, or as a last resort, a “trial” membership. (“No pun intended,” Marcus noted, “but lawyers do respond to the word ‘trial.’”)

Direct mail currently is used by the organization as a retention tool. The ABA is contemplating mail tests for prospecting, something it hasn't done in the past because telephone response rates were so high, he said.

The ABA has several dues classes, varying from $100 to $300 depending on the number of years since the attorney passed the bar exam. Marcus said the association doesn't have the funds to call everyone on its list, so it analyzes the file based on past responses to see which names have the best likely return.

The connection rate for calls is about 90%, while the contact rate with the right person is about 40%. The response for the 25,000 names that dropped off the member file recently was 50%, while the response for the 65,000-name universe of those who fell off in the last one to three years was 35%.

By implementing a “propensity to pay” model developed by DeCosmo and Associates of Burr Ridge, IL, the ABA's first-year payment rates among the modeled group jumped by 40%.

Marcus noted that the more data the ABA has on a member, the higher the retention rate. While the Chicago-based association can infer things like age from the time a member passed the bar exam, he said the group is hesitant to overlay vast amounts of data on its list because of privacy concerns.

Nonprofit associations need to have definite goals in their fundraising programs, said Frank Roman, a nonprofit consultant. The group must recognize whether it has short- or long-term targets in mind, and like any marketing organization, have a clear idea of how it's measuring return on investment.