The UKU Board made a decision in late 2010 to make some changes to the structure of UKU membership to make the membership system easier to administer for players, team-administrators, and the organisation.  This article outlines the changes and the reasoning behind what is being done.

We decided that we would return to the approach of using an annual, fixed, renewal date for all members.  On reviewing the way the competition calendar works, and in recognition of the large numbers of university students that are members of UK Ultimate, we decided to set the expiry date to Sept 30th.  This is the closest we have to a sensible date that is “between seasons” – although it is noted that players competing at the European Ultimate Championships Finals might sometimes finish their season in early October.

One of the issues we have found with the current system is that it doesn’t help us to maintain and enforce the policy of a membership subscription that is designed to be continuous, renewed annually.  A big proportion of the costs we incur are either ongoing running costs (e.g. staff costs or server-hosting costs to pick two examples at very different scales), or annual in nature (e.g. WFDF membership fees, or the cost of producing and distributing Ultimatum!).  A further important, if uninspiring, detail is that the liability insurance policy requires that the individual must have cover (i.e. be a member) on a continuous basis. 

For most people this change in itself is probably of little concern, indeed hopefully for many, the certainty of the renewal date will resolve the difficulty people have remembering when and whether to renew their membership!  However – it does raise a question of how the switchover is handled.  We took the decision that the first “mass-expiry” date would be 30th September 2012, which raises the issue of how to handle membership renewals during 2012.

The perhaps more controversial decision we have taken is to leave the membership prices for 2012 at the normal prices throughout the year.  This effectively means that members will pay the normal price for a reduced “year”.  This seems a bit unfair: why have we done that?  The UKU Board feel there are a number of reasons why it is not as unfair as it might appear.

• Over the medium-long term of an individual’s membership of UKU all that is really happening is the “pulling forwards” of the next membership payment.  The total number of annual memberships paid by the individual to UK Ultimate is quite unlikely to be increased by this decision.
• Simplicity.  We could have chosen to reduce the 2011-membership amounts quarter-by-quarter, or month-by-month, but this would make the whole process more complicated and introduce incentives for people to delay renewal (which is hard to track automatically).
• A significant proportion of our members were members when we had the previous fixed-renewal date of 1st Jan.  So strictly speaking, although for many of those people the renewal date has slipped into March-June period, their actual renewal date should be 1st Jan (for all the reasons noted above about continuous membership).  Point being that for a reasonable proportion of members the shortened “year” is not actually as shortened as they might feel.
• The actual amounts for any individual membership fee are really not large amounts of money, and UK Ultimate has managed to use growth in number of players to support a growing sport and growing organisation without increasing the fees in over ten years.
• Repeating a point made above, although we collect the membership payments on an annual basis, that income is really paying for organisation (and its costs) that exist on a continuous basis.

But – we accept that you might be un-moved by these arguments.  So we are offering the following alternative.  If you believe your membership fee for 2012 should be pro-rated based on the time between your renewal date and 30th Sept 2012 then you may pay that amount (by cheque only) as follows:
1.    Calculate the proportion of the year that you need to pay for and multiply that by the annual membership fee
2.    Make cheque payable to “UK Ultimate” for the amount calculated above
3.    Put your UKU username on the back of the cheque
4.    Send cheque to “UK Ultimate, c/o S Hill, 2-B Wellesley Road, TWICKENHAM TW2 5RS”
5.    We will then update your membership manually once the cheque has been paid in successfully