Membership Status Verification

My chapter had our first board meeting of the year yesterday and the topic of verifying the EAA National membership status of our local chapter members came up. We have some members who want to be involved locally but do not want an EAA National membership. I know this is not an issue unique to our chapter. We do strongly encourage an EAA National membership, but at the same time, aviation is a small community and we don't want to push anyone away from our chapter just because they won't get a National membership. As a solution, we came up with a "Limited Chapter Membership" to address this issue which has scaled back privileges within our chapter. The issue we now have is verifying who is truly a paid member of EAA National. Just because someone had a membership number when they joined our chapter doesn't mean it's still current. Does anyone know if there is an easy way for determining this?

I thought an online tool would be nice for Chapter leaders to verify this. We could enter a set of EAA membership numbers into a text box, much like the UPS tracking number tool on the UPS website, and have it display the status of each EAA number. It would just need to show the expiration date of the membership or if it's already expired; no personal info would be needed. We have 97 members so it would need to be a batch process as one at a time would be way too time consuming!

Kevin

We just show a current EAA card when we renew our dues at our chapter.

We do have a couple that aren't members - but they're not pilots or own aircraft! They love aviation, though, and pitch in on events and stuff when they can....sort of like associate members.

Hi Kevin,

You have uncovered one of our on-going challenges.

I can tell you it is an issue we have on the priority list. In the meantime, if you want to send us the member list, we can look them up on this end. Not a perfect answer, but it will help.

Steve

Well, Steve, we meet again. As you know we advocate a national EAA register that Chapter leaders can access on line and a "Chapter Association" column so that when we solicit "members" to join a local chapter, we're not going after another chapter's members. A related problem we've encountered is the "family" membership. Most of our significant others are not pilots and participate in only a limited way. We encourage family participation by all family members and are trying to include activities that appeal to this significant part of our group, but the extra cost for family membership serves no purpose and turns off a number of our people. Unfortunately, national membership is required to serve in a leadership position at the local level. We are considering a single class of membership which includes family, but how can we reconcile that with you? My wife is secretary for our chapter and has a national membership to qualify, but she's not a pilot and has little interest in flying except as a mode of transportation, but we pay the extra $10.00 to EAA and another $5.00 to our chapter for the privilege of volunteering.

Dave

When I was a chapter president...many years ago...the chapter office sent me a roster of all EAA members within a specific geographical area using zip codes. It simply showed name and address of current members.

Does the chapter office no longer provide that?

Hi Jim,

National still provides this service to the best of my knowledge. I routinely request an update for our area. The only problem is that it doesn't list any Chapter affiliation. When we try to recruit off this list, we find that some of these people are already members of a local. My understanding is that National use to have this information but has stopped the practice. It would take a lot of work to start it back up, but with the emphasis on Chapters expressed by the President, maybe it can be returned. We know there are over 300 EAA members in our area, but we only have around 40 Chapter members. When it comes to having a voice in our airport community, we only carry a twig. 100 members would mean having a big stick.

Dave Miller