Originally Posted by
init4fun
But you see Sport , Mike's position is spot on . Believe me I have nothing against youth free memberships either , I used to be a kid myself , raised a couple over the years , and I have a generally quite positive outlook that most of em will turn out to be fine adults . But the fact remains that free memberships do nothing tword "keeping the lights on" as it were , and when an organization with less than 200K members counts a full quarter of those as being paper memberships only , and those free memberships representing the biggest growth sector , Yea , I'd say there's a problem .
I don't see it as a problem at all. The press will be reporting the full membership including the youth membership. I see that as a plus not a minus. Would you really want them to report the fact that a good portion is youth membership? Or just the lower amount without youth membership? What is a problem is the overall number could be larger. When was the last time it was updated for 2016? Is it lower now because many have not renewed? If not why is the AMA not reminding those to renew? We may need more publicity or advertisement to get the numbers up. What is the problem there? But IMO youth membership is not the problem. In fact it would be nice if more people asked for youth membership.