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Feedback in response to an anonymous membership survey

This article is a response to the Membership Survey that was conducted in October-November 2022 (read report). 

We are always grateful for feedback from our members and value the replies to our recent Membership Survey. While some suggestions for the website are way beyond what the Secretariat can achieve, many of your suggestions will be considered with the new version of the website that we are currently working on. We will especially try to allow for more members to post information and include more interactivity. Several comments alerted us to website issues that we have now fixed or others that we hope to fix soon. One suggestion was to announce all the interesting features that are offered on the website, which many members are unaware of. As a start we will list a few of these at the end of this article. More generally, since the survey was anonymous, we will use this article to answer individual respondents’ queries and clarify some points about IUSSP or the website. 

Membership Directory:

The membership directory is not used as much as we hoped, including to find colleagues working on a given topic or for networking. To find a member, you can type a last name or first name or any part of either and a list of corresponding current members will be returned. But you can also search for members in a given country or in an organization, by working language, by field of study, area of specialization or regional focus.  

But the advanced search works only to the extent that members fill out their profile. The survey results indicate that 39% of current members and students completed their profile, while 41% declare they partially completed it and 20% indicate they have not completed it at all. The completion rates of survey respondents are likely to be superior to those of the membership as a whole. 

The member profile pages are accessible to the public. They were originally restricted to members, but this “limitation” was viewed as counterproductive as most of our members would prefer these pages to be visible also to non-members. The Council therefore decided to make them public, removing the most sensitive information and giving members the option to hide their profile page if they prefer (see communication settings below).

Communication settings:

You can select your account settings in MyIUSSP: https://iussp.org/en/account-settings. By default, the settings are all are ticked ‘yes’.

Email address:

It is of vital importance to keep your contact details, and especially your email address, up to date in your membership profile! Most cases of failed communication are caused by old email addresses that were not updated when members changed their email address during a career change.

Website:

It would be great to allow people other than the Secretariat to manage certain web pages and thus update the pages more easily. We hope a new version of the website will allow this for sister population associations, IUSSP Panels or individual volunteer members, but for the moment this is not yet possible.  

Resources: the list of institutions listed in ‘Resources’ is certainly a random list. We appreciate the member suggestion to add a form to those pages to allow people to suggest additions. A link to such a form has now been added to two of those resource pages. 

Archive: an archive of all meetings is available in IUSSP Meetings and Events, which includes both upcoming and past events, with links when available. Note that some of the older links do not currently work. We hope to make these available on the new website. 

N-IUSSP:

Thanks to a survey respondent, we realized that when the weekly N-IUSSP article was placed at the top of the home page in a revolving banner its direct access from the home page was removed. The N-IUSSP article is now displayed as the first “banner” at the top of the IUSSP home page (awaiting further changes to the website).

Membership:

The IUSSP is not a wealthy private foundation or intergovernmental organization. It is an association of individual members whose dues are essential to its financial sustainability, even more now given a donor environment in which core funding for the Secretariat to function has almost completely disappeared.  

Fees: the regular annual membership fee is Euro 100, but discounts are in place for residents of middle-income countries (Euro 50) and low-income countries (Euro 25) as well as for retired members (50% discount). There is also a discount for those who are not able to pay the full amount (see “hardship fee” 25 euros). In addition, there are also reductions when you pay for several years in advance. Student associates can join for up to 4 years for free. A grace period of 6 months after your membership expiry date is included during which you will receive email reminders to renew. Keeping a continuous membership entitles you to yet another discount for the International Population Conference.

Payments: we prefer payments by credit card (the easiest way) or by bank transfer or check (a much more cumbersome procedure). We are aware that more and more payments by credit card, particularly international payments, fail due to heightened bank security systems. The new website will include a new payment platform which we hope will make online payments easier. We also realize that for some individuals or countries, electronic payments are not an option but for this there is little we can do except encourage members in those countries to find someone to make the payment for them. 

Any payment made to IUSSP produces an automated receipt (the format of which is not ideal and should be improved). If you do not receive a copy of the receipt by email, please contact us. 

Support:

The IUSSP has a small staff (3 currently, all with full time tasks unrelated to the website) which means that it is simply not possible to provide some of the services suggested by respondents (in particular, live support). Nevertheless, we do our utmost to respond to your queries, so for all IUSSP-related issues, please send an email to contact@iussp.org

Content and features on the IUSSP website include:

Meetings

• List of upcoming and past IUSSP activities (and summary articles): https://www.iussp.org/en/iussp-meetings-and-events
  
  
• Calendar of IUSSP and other population events: https://www.iussp.org/en/upcoming-events
  
  
• International population conferences (past and upcoming): https://www.iussp.org/en/international-population-conference
  
  
• IUSSP webinar series: https://www.iussp.org/en/iussp-webinar-series

Training

• Various online training courses and tools:
  https://www.iussp.org/en/online-courses-and-training-tools

• Tools for Demographic Estimation: http://demographicestimation.iussp.org/

• Population Analysis for Policies & Programmes: http://papp.iussp.org/

• Demopaedia: http://www.demopaedia.org/tools/?lang=en

Membership

• All the information on membership dues:
  https://www.iussp.org/en/membership-dues
  
  
• Edit your profile (especially your contact information or specialization etc.): https://www.iussp.org/en/my-details 
  (*See also Tips for updating Member profile page)
  
  
• Member directory and search: https://www.iussp.org/en/directorysearch 
  (*See also Tips on how to do an advanced search)
  
  
• Suggestions from members form: https://www.iussp.org/en/suggestions-members-0

YouTube channel:

The IUSSP has a YouTube channel where most IUSSP videos are available. Some videos on the IUSSP website are posted on other platforms. Check out our YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/@IUSSP