Behind the Numbers

Many groups use the term, but definition of ‘member’ varies

Mark Pilipczuk can learn a lot about his organization simply by looking at its weekly membership report. For Mr. Pilipczuk, the vice president of marketing at the World Wildlife Fund, in Washington, membership numbers can quickly tell him whether his organization is effectively communicating its message, whether it needs to increase its membership-recruitment efforts, and even whether specific promotions, like credit cards that bear its name, are doing as well as expected.

“It’s a key management tool,” he says of his group’s membership database, which breaks members into three distinct categories and is updated weekly. “It helps you understand if people are supporting you or aren’t supporting you.”

For Mr. Pilipczuk, who came to the World Wildlife Fund last year from a marketing position at America Online, tracking his organization’s 1.2 million members is also a matter of credibility. If the charity isn’t accurately counting and reporting its membership numbers, it runs the risk of losing the trust of its donors — or those who are lobbied by the group on environmental issues.

“You better have the number you say you have, because if it comes out that it’s inflated, your organization loses credibility,” he says. “The credibility of the organization is everything.”

But in an era when nonprofit groups are increasingly policing themselves on issues such as fund raising, accounting, and board governance, little attention has been paid to making sure charities are being transparent when they count and report their membership numbers.

This issue, however, is getting increased attention from some charities in the wake of a recent membership-counting scandal involving Boy Scouts of America, and as advocacy groups step up their efforts to lobby the U.S. Senate regarding President Bush’s nomination of John Roberts as a Supreme Court justice.

Stating membership numbers clearly is so important that Sen. Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, says lawmakers should consider whether new federal rules are needed to ensure that organizations are not exaggerating their size.

“Padding any numbers is wrong, for a business or a charity,” says Senator Grassley, who as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee is planning to propose a package of legislative measures designed to improve nonprofit accountablity. “Inflated numbers, or those that can’t be verified, hurt the nonprofits’ credibility with potential donors and with lawmakers. People don’t want to contribute to a group or cite a group’s findings in the legislative process and then find out later that the group is a lot less representative of a cause than they thought. And if membership numbers are unreliable, then maybe other aspects of the nonprofits are questionable, too.”

‘It’s About Honesty’

It might be time for charities to make a pledge to hold their membership numbers to the same standards to which they hold their financial reporting, says Diana Aviv, president of Independent Sector, a Washington coalition of charities and foundations. If not, they risk running into some of the same ethical land mines that doom groups that fail to properly monitor their accounting systems or fund-raising efforts.

“Nonprofit organizations should be very clear in how they count their numbers,” says Ms. Aviv. “In the end, it’s about honesty. It’s about being forthright to the public.”

Ms. Aviv says big membership numbers can give a charity more clout in its fund-raising efforts and more credibility in its advocacy efforts. In addition, nonprofit employees might also have an incentive to inflate membership numbers to impress board members or enhance their résumés. These pressures could lead some organizations to doctor their numbers or to count members on their rolls long after they have stopped paying their dues.

But, if they are caught, those who inflate membership numbers can face substantial penalties. An executive at the Boy Scouts of America’s Atlanta council, for example, was forced to resign this past spring after the organization learned that the council had exaggerated the number of boys it had signed up for a program aimed at increasing its minority membership. The resignation followed news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was probing the council’s records to determine whether it was falsifying its enrollment numbers (The Chronicle, June 9).

Boy Scouts of America has since changed the rules that govern how its 310 local councils tally their membership numbers. Before the Atlanta incident, the group’s Irving, Tex., headquarters required the signature of only one person — a council’s chief executive — on membership reports.

Under the new rules, several key members of a council’s staff are required to review and sign all membership reports, says Gregg Shields, national spokesman for the Boy Scouts of America. The change is designed to create more checks and balances in the charity’s membership-reporting system to prevent a single person from inflating numbers.

Differing Standards

Most advocacy groups have clearly defined rules that govern how they count and report their membership numbers. At the same time, those organizations each have different standards for defining and accounting for their members.

As a result of this array of varying definitions and systems, donors and politicians who try to figure out the strength of similar organizations are often unable to get an apples-to-apples comparison of how effective those charities are in attracting and retaining members.

Advocacy groups on both sides of the Supreme Court nomination battle, for instance, have distinctly different ways of counting and reporting their membership totals.

People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group in Washington, reports that it has about 750,000 members and supporters. Members are those who donate a minimum of $35 annually to the charity, which opposes Bush’s choice, says its president, Ralph Neas.

Supporters are those who respond to the group’s request to contact the president or Congress on issues of importance to the organization. Mr. Neas estimates that People for the American Way has roughly equal numbers of members and supporters.

On the other side of the Supreme Court debate, Focus on the Family, of Colorado Springs, Colo., does not require members to make a financial donation. If a person asks to be on the group’s mailing list and makes regular contact with the organization, he or she is counted as a Focus on the Family “constituent” — the group’s term for a member, according to Paul Hetrick, vice president of media relations. If a constituent loses touch with Focus on the Family, or asks to be removed from its mailing list, he or she is no longer counted.

“It’s not tied to a donation. There are no dues or fees,” says Mr. Hetrick. “But it’s someone who wants to be there. We only want to count people who are there by their own request.” The constituency, he says, currently numbers 2.5 million households. Focus on the Family’s affiliated lobbying arm, Focus on the Family Action, maintains a separate membership list.

While these numbers help convey to lawmakers the relative size of an organization, advocacy groups say their membership numbers are particularly important because they reflect an organization’s ability to mobilize supporters to lobby government officials on key issues.

Mr. Neas, for example, says members are frequently willing to respond to calls by the organization to sign petitions to elected officials and to write letters to newspaper editors.

Naral Pro-Choice America, a Washington group that favors legal abortion, contacted 800,000 of its members and supporters on the night President Bush nominated Mr. Roberts to the bench, says Ted Miller, Naral’s spokesman.

“We engaged our members and encouraged them to contact their senators to oppose the nominee,” says Mr. Miller, who was unable to provide an official membership total for his group. “This is the first Supreme Court nomination of the Internet age. The political landscape has changed dramatically.”

Paying Dues

But while some groups do not require its members or supporters to pay fees or make financial contributions, other groups only count members who pay a regular membership fee or who make an annual donation. The range of those required contributions, however, varies widely.

Disabled American Veterans, of Cold Spring, Ky., is open only to military veterans who were injured or suffered in the line of duty and who pay an initiation fee to the organization. For veterans younger than 40, that fee is $250, and it declines on a sliding scale, with older members paying less, says Michael Walsh, the charity’s membership director. Once veterans pay the initiation fee, they are considered “life members” of the organization, a number that currently stands at approximately 1 million.

The organization takes that number seriously when it lobbies lawmakers, says Mr. Walsh. “It adds strength to us when we go before Congress,” he says. “We can say ‘We have one million fully paid members out there.’ At a time when Congress is looking to cut back, they need to look at veterans as a cost of war.”

Greenpeace, an international environmental advocacy organization that has American offices in Washington and San Francisco, also requires members to pay a fee — either annually or monthly — to maintain their membership, says Matthew Sherrington, director of development at Greenpeace USA.

The organization, which has 180,000 members in the United States and about 2.8 million worldwide, has been pushing to land a greater number of monthly members, Mr. Sherrington says, and scaling back its efforts to recruit more members who pay an annual fee. That effort, he says, has generated more revenue but thinned Greenpeace’s overall membership number in recent years since monthly members are required to pay at least $30 every month, which is more costly than annual memberships.

While the overall membership rolls have shrunk, the organization believes it has been left with a stronger group of supporters, because those members are giving more and are having more regular contact with the organization.

“Greenpeace’s file size appears to be on the decline while others are growing,” Mr. Sherrington says. “But I’m less concerned about the nominal numbers. In the end, what we’re about as an organization is passion. What we hope for is we can inspire our members and supporters to stay with us longer.”

While groups as diverse as Disabled American Veterans and Greenpeace are willing to outline their membership counting systems, others are not. The American Civil Liberties Union, in New York, declined to discuss its membership policies. Progress for America, a conservative advocacy group in Washington, did not return phone calls for this article, nor did numerous other groups.

Revising the Rules

Because of the diversity ofmembership-counting systems and philosophies, Mr. Pilipczuk of the World Wildlife Fund says it is important that membership groups stay consistent when they report their membership numbers. He says it would probably be too unwieldy to require membership groups to conform to a nationwide standard for counting members. But, absent universal regulations, Mr. Pilipczuk says each organization should have its own strict set of standards for defining its members — and those standards shouldn’t waver.

“It has to be replicable,” Mr. Pilipczuk says. “You have to count the members the same year after year. Consistency is the key. As long as it is consistent and accountable and it makes sense, I think that’s the important thing.”

The exception, says Ms. Aviv, is when a charity determines that its existing membership standards do not provide an accurate count of its true support.

Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, a support and advocacy group in Washington, pruned its membership rolls recently. This spring, after its trustees and executives reviewed the organization’s database and found that it was counting about 50,000 inactive members and supporters, the group dropped its total number from about 250,000 to 200,000 members and supporters, says Jody Huckaby, the organization’s executive director.

The organization doesn’t have a rigid standard for terminating memberships, says Mr. Huckaby. “It’s something we’re evaluating,” he says. But first, he adds, the charity wants to install a more modern database system and review the responses it receives from those who are cut from the rolls.

“We’re looking to get rid of an antiquated database system and really get into the 21st century,” he says.

What hasn’t changed, Mr. Huckaby says, is the organization’s system for adding and accounting for members and supporters. Members can either join through local chapters — which set their own membership fees — or by paying for a $50 membership through the organization’s national office.

Because each membership is available to a member’s entire household, the organization multiplies its number of paid memberships by 2.47 — the average size of a U.S. household — to determine its formal count of members and supporters. Based on that formula, the group calculates roughly 200,000 members and supporters, based on 80,000 paid memberships.

Pruning the Rolls

Some groups maintain strict guidelines for purging inactive members from their rolls. Boy Scouts of America, for instance, requires its six million members to pay an annual membership fee of $10, Mr. Shields says. In addition to paying the fee, the member must also participate in scouting activities during that year. If a member doesn’t pay the fee before the start of the next year, he is no longer counted as a member.

Other charities keep different levels of membership — and need to clearly report the distinctions between those different tiers to the public.

The World Wildlife Fund, for instance, has three types of members. The first category comprises financial supporters who pay a minimum annual fee of $15. The next is supporters who are part of the charity’s online conservation action network or who actively lobby legislators on conservation issues. The third and smallest group is those who support the fund through other means, such as by carrying a credit card that bears the charity’s name.

Mr. Pilipczuk says he tracks each member category closely — and can break out how many of its members and supporters fall into each of those categories. The organization also has clear rules on how it reports its membership and is careful to remain consistent in its accounting for that number.

“I would hate to find that other organizations are inflating their numbers or aren’t being careful and consistent in their reporting,” he says. “The key is, can you rely on that organization in how it counts its members so you as a donor or member can make a decision about whether that organization is worth supporting?”