So far, 2012 has been the year of growing Foundation Trust memberships. Our membership services team can attest to this.
So far, we have recruited around 40,000 members on behalf of our Foundation Trust clients. Even with the drop dead date for Foundation Trust authorisation abandoned (to some degree) MES are seeing an ever increasing number of aspirant and authorised Foundation Trusts looking to recruit members to share in their journey.
Different Membership Categories
The memberships themselves are comprised of different categories. Traditionally Trusts have differentiated between staff, public and patients. But in recent times the trend has been to slim this down to just staff and public.
Why? Because it can prove tricky to decide when a patient is not a member of the public and vice versa. (As if the concept of foundation trust membership wasn't a tricky enough concept for new members to wrap their head around!). There are still plenty of instances where Trusts choose to make the distinction, often those battling with associated stigma of being a patient, e.g. mental health providers.
When it comes to staff membership, the process is usually fairly straightforward; they get opted in by the Trust and can choose to not be involved if they so wish. Different types of Trusts have different challenges when engaging their staff, large acutes can struggle with getting buy-in over such a big staff base, whereas community providers have already been through quite a journey with their staff over the past few years.
Merging Foundation Trusts
Another recent phenomenon is Trusts buying other Trusts in their entirety. This is all well and good for the expanding provider, but what happens to members in this instance? Simply merging the two memberships is not something that is possible from either a legal point-of-view or desirable from a best practice point of view.
So what to do with all the members of the Trust that is being consumed?
As members have joined one Trust only, we need to get their expressed permission to be transferred across. The challenge is to do this in the cheapest and most effective way possible. However, unlike when recruiting from scratch, we don't need addresses, email addresses or phone numbers again, we already have those. All we need is permission.
Great success
We have had great success in asking members to show their commitment to a new organisation by returning a text message or simply popping a personalised postcard back in the post box.
We don't need information we already have, instead we can make it as easy as possible for them to say "Yes". What's more we can use information we hold on them to make our approach even more effective. For example, if we know people like receiving text messages we won't send them a postcard.
As Trusts merge, and the lines between what constitutes a community or acute Trust create more blur there will be more work to do in helping the public understand how they can get involved and what it entails.
The important thing is to make sure that the public are the ones that come first.
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