{"id":712,"date":"2009-06-11T21:22:05","date_gmt":"2009-06-12T01:22:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=712"},"modified":"2009-06-11T21:22:05","modified_gmt":"2009-06-12T01:22:05","slug":"informs-30000-members-or-5000","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2009\/06\/11\/informs-30000-members-or-5000\/","title":{"rendered":"INFORMS: 30,000 members or 5,000?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was elected President of INFORMS<\/a> in 2000 (my Presidential Year was 2002:\u00a0 they ease you into the job!), I was very proud to become President of a 14,000 member society (at the age of 42:\u00a0 don’t let the grey hair fool you).\u00a0 14,000?\u00a0 Actually probably 12,000.\u00a0 Maybe 11,500.\u00a0 Where did all the members go?\u00a0 As I looked into things, I was pointed to (thanks Les Servi!) Bowling Alone<\/em><\/a>, which gave exhausting statistical evidence that social capital activities of all types (including professional society membership) were decreasing.\u00a0\u00a0 The importance of social capital and the need for societies to increase social capital opportunities became the theme of my presidency<\/a>.\u00a0 We did some good things during my year, and many of those have continued.<\/p>\n

But INFORMS remains a 10,000-12,000 member society.\u00a0 Financially, this is currently not much of an issue:\u00a0 “membership” on the INFORMS books loses money. But the times, they are a’changing.\u00a0 The main moneymaker for INFORMS is publications, with a very strong emphasis on academic library subscriptions.\u00a0\u00a0 INFORMS would be a financially healthy organization if all it did was publish Management Science<\/em>.\u00a0 But you don’t need to be a diviner to see that this is not a stable base.\u00a0 Academic libaries are cutting budgets<\/a> and alternative publication outlets are increasing in importance.\u00a0 Even now, I need to stress to my colleagues from a computer science background that they (currently) need to publish in journals:\u00a0 for them, conferences provide the primary outlet.<\/p>\n

Even beyond the financials, having a strong membership is a good thing for our field.\u00a0 While I was convinced by Bowling Alone <\/em>that a decreasing membership is not the sign of the death of a field, not everyone buys that argument.\u00a0 If operations research is as important as, say, economics, why are there 20,000 members of the American Economic Association<\/a> but only 10,000 members of INFORMS?\u00a0 (By the way, the AEA table gives a good picture of the issues every society is facing:\u00a0 is economics really 20% less relevant now than it was in 2001, as given by the AEA membership numbers?).<\/p>\n

So, to get to the crux, can INFORMS be a 20,000 (or 30,000 or 50,000) member society?\u00a0 The US Bureau of Labor Statistics<\/a> believes there are 58,000 OR analysts, and predicts this to increase to 65,000 in 2016.\u00a0 I would guess that no more than 1,000 of these are members of INFORMS (I would not fall in this category, and I am pretty typical of INFORMS members).\u00a0 Is this our market?\u00a0 How would we get them?\u00a0 Or are there people in our traditional group (Ph.D.s or students towards that degree, primarily in academia but many in practice or academics with a practice bent) that we should be aiming for?\u00a0 Or perhaps retention is the issue:\u00a0 we lose 20-30% per year (I believe), meaning we have to attract 2,000-3,000 new members per year just to stay even.<\/p>\n

Or should INFORMS be happy decreasing to to 5,000 members, perhaps while still providing services to a larger group?\u00a0 Would this be a bad outcome?<\/p>\n

I’m on a few committees for INFORMS that look at these issues, but, now that my Board time is done, I don’t speak for INFORMS.\u00a0 So I am interested in your<\/em> views, loyal reader of MTORP:\u00a0 What should INFORMS do?\u00a0 The easy answer is to provide more at a lower cost.\u00a0 That is going to be hard to do.<\/p>\n

We can provide less at a lower cost: imagine a $30 membership where you get nothing more than a subscription to OR\/MS Today<\/em><\/a> (a fantastic magazine).\u00a0 Everything else is a la carte<\/em>.\u00a0 You want to go to a conference:\u00a0 no member discount (or perhaps you have to be a member, so you have saved $30);\u00a0 you want a journal:\u00a0 here’s the cost;\u00a0 want a subdivision:\u00a0 they all now charge real dues.\u00a0 $30 gets you in the door:\u00a0 everything else has a price tag.\u00a0 Jim Orlin provided one vision<\/a> of a lower cost membership.<\/p>\n

Or perhaps we increase membership to $250 (it is currently $144).\u00a0 We upgrade the website to create a true social network.\u00a0 Everything becomes cheaper (for members!).\u00a0 But we lose lots of members who don’t want to pay $250.<\/p>\n

But I don’t want to provide too many possibilities:\u00a0 I’d like your views.\u00a0 What would you like INFORMS to do, and why?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was elected President of INFORMS in 2000 (my Presidential Year was 2002:\u00a0 they ease you into the job!), I was very proud to become President of a 14,000 member society (at the age of 42:\u00a0 don’t let the grey hair fool you).\u00a0 14,000?\u00a0 Actually probably 12,000.\u00a0 Maybe 11,500.\u00a0 Where did all the members … Continue reading “INFORMS: 30,000 members or 5,000?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-informs","category-social-capital"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}