Eighteen months after ending discounted membership dues, American Trucking Associations has solidified its base of carrier members and is putting in place the elements for a widespread campaign to recruit and retain members, association officials said last week.
ATA’s carrier membership declined 7% in 1999 as the association cut off members who had received discounted rates and did not want to pay the published dues schedule, said David Barefoot, the association’s chief financial officer.
“We have squeezed out all the people who had dues deals. We have purified and solidified our database. “We’re doing the same thing trucking companies do every day,” added ATA President Walter B. McCormick Jr. “We have wiped bad accounts off the books and focused our resources where the revenue potential is the greatest. Going forward, every trucking company that we call a member of ATA is a full dues-paying member. There is no artificial inflation of our membership figures any longer.”
ATA’s cancellation of 846 members, nearly all of whom had received discounted dues, did not dramatically effect its bottom line, Barefoot said. “The members we canceled only paid 33 cents of their 1999 membership dollar.”
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