STP at 75: Membership & Member Communication

I sent you a few starting questions. We shouldn’t feel constrained by these questions. If we get off on something, that’s perfectly fine. Let’s go ahead and start with the first question I sent you: What were the main vehicles for membership communication during your time in leadership? I’d like to start with the more senior people here and move to current leaders. Tom Pusateri, you’re really the most senior in terms of membership communication because you were membership chair back in 1994, and that-

I think also though Linda Noble was serving as the secretary around that time as well. I believe that she’s the one…Marky Lloyd was the one that started the newsletter.

Linda wasn’t Secretary until ‘96, so I’m going to stick you with it as being the senior guy here.

What I think we were doing in the 1990s was primarily through letters to try to develop a welcome packet for members when they joined. We certainly had information within the journal Teaching of Psychology (ToP) that listed the program at APA and the news from the division. That’s how we basically communicated. We started to develop a print newsletter in the late 1980s. Initially published once a year, it turned to a biannual newsletter a couple of years later.

Linda, I think you’re probably, at this point, the one to jump in about the newsletter.

I served as editor of the newsletter at some point, that in my memory was really our greatest way to get information to our members. I don’t remember what year it was, but I think we also did a pretty extensive membership survey in the 90s, didn’t we?

Yes. We did.

That was really an opportunity to hear from our members, to get some information from them.

We attempted to do that every 5 or so years.

I think there was one point where you skipped it, if I read the Executive Committee minutes correctly, because there was some other survey going on.

I ought to then interject here, because in 1996 at the annual convention the Executive Committee appointed me as the electronic material’s coordinator. I had previously recommended that we think about an internet editorship, and the EC said no. The very next thing was in January of ‘97 the Office of Teaching Resources in Psychology (OTRP) went online, and then just after that, in 1998 we actually got teachpsych.org as our domain name and wound up there by 1999, establishing a comprehensive web portal at teachpsych.org, which consisted of the STP homepage and the OTRP online materials. I will point out by the way, that when we put OTRP online in ‘97, according to the Hobbes’ Internet Timeline, there were fewer than a million worldwide websites online at that point as opposed to right now somewhere upwards of just under 2 billion. This was very, very early in the development of the World Wide Web.

Vinny, I know that you weren’t the internet editor when I took over, there was someone in between us-

John Williams.

John, right. When I started, I archived all the content that we had. At that time, the STP home page had two versions, one with graphics and one with just text.

That was the original portal entry.

It was. The page had links to OTRP, the ToP journal, and eight eBook publications (five of them compendiums of “Essays from E-xcellence in Teaching”).

I left the position of internet editor in the summer of 2005 and John took it over. At that point, we had a total of eight eBooks that were online. Then I think maybe the next year or so you took over.

I was trying to rack my brain about how that newsletter evolved over time. I remember we did a teaching tips column. We ran statements from the candidates for the officers’ positions. I remember it being a pretty big production because we would have it printed and our staff at Kennesaw State would help with the mailing. Back in those days, it was really the only way to get something to our members, but the newsletter evolved in presence, format, and content I think in a way that was more useful to our members.

There was an evolution of the content of the newsletter that would include sometimes featured articles. What I think happened over time was that with the newsletter being biannual, there’s always a concern about whether, especially now we have the presence on the web, we were paying good money to get that distributed by print to our members, or if we should change it to an electronic format. Again, I looked over the votes that the Executive Committee had taken over the years, and it wasn’t until September 2007 that we provided an optional electronic version of the newsletter, and we gave people the option to opt out of the print newsletter. It wasn’t until 2013 that we decided to go completely electronic. During that 2007–2013 period, I remember the issue coming up repeatedly and people were very concerned that the print copy was a tangible member benefit that they did not want to lose. Finally, we voted that it was just too expensive to continue doing that for the value we were getting.

We argued for many years about giving up the paper. That was very hard.

Let me add some things now too. In 1999, the Long-Range Planning Committee (LRPC) took up among other items the question of where STP might go digitally. I wasn’t myself on that committee, but I got a telephone call after that around March from Wayne Weiten saying that the LRPC had decided maybe we did need an internet editor. Then, he asked me if I would be willing to serve in that editor’s position, which I agreed to do. I made the transition into the internet editor role during the spring and summer of 1999. Just after that, in October of 1999, Bill Hill established the PsychTeacher Listserv. We had a grand total at the beginning of 2000 of 300 subscribers that grew to almost 1,400 subscribers by 2004.

I don’t know how many now, but there’s so many other electronic ways we have now to communicate with members. I want to invite Meera and Jeremy to talk a little bit about some of the things today that we use to communicate.

Sure. I’ve been serving in this role as vice president of membership since 2016. I just started my second term. What I inherited was already a very elaborate and well set up organization. We have various subcommittees that help us to reach out to various segments of membership. We have one group that is focused on early career psychologists, one that is focused on graduate students. Then, a couple of years ago we added a Member Communication Committee that was focused mainly on social media. Their responsibility was to oversee STP’s social media presence. This includes a Facebook group, a LinkedIn group, and a Twitter account. As of September 2019, the Facebook group has over 10,000 members, 396 of whom joined in the last 28 days.

In contrast, PsychTeacher has about 3000 subscribers.

For the Twitter account at teachpsych.org, since February 2019, we’ve added 335 new followers, an average of about two new followers per day and now have 2,633 followers. The LinkedIn group has about 318 members. We also have a blog, called “This is How I Teach.” We also have a Membership Committee. The Membership Committee basically sends out a welcome letter to every new member and does inserts in ToP so that people get updates on things that are going on. These are just some of the various ways in which we are connecting with our members. We also try to entice new members by offering them attractive swag at various conferences.

Let me correct an error that I made. I meant to say 2,000 members of PsychTeacher. It’s even smaller. I think something happened because recently the listserv program that APA had, had some glitches in it, and I think it kicked out a lot of members. We’ve lost membership over time on PsychTeacher.

The listserv software gave us problems off and on since its inception. Jeremy Houska, could you talk a little bit about the Teaching of Psychology Idea Exchange (ToPIX)? I’m not that familiar with that.

I was overseeing ToPIX; I inherited it from Sue Franz in about 2013, I believe, and was overseeing it through ‘16. What I did there was really to cull some of the best activities and tips and whatnot from the PsychTeacher listserv and repurpose them on ToPIX. I also looked on my own for other interesting teaching strategies to go on ToPIX, so as to drive potential new members toward STP. I encouraged members at the time to share information to that medium and one central place (pbworks.com). I tried to also push ToPIX updates to the STP Internet site to catch more eyeballs. There was a blog there at the time, so I just tried to highlight the new content that was going up on ToPIX. We also pushed some of those ToPIX updates to Facebook to drive a bit of traffic to these STP channels.

I just wanted to comment on how this has changed. There used to be a single medium of communication, and now you have multiple channels. The problem is that people have their own preferred channel, which means you can’t demand a single communication channel, and so you must be flexible. Therefore, you’ve seen the committees that Meera is talking about grow so much. It’s because you must keep the current ones…plus, you must accommodate the new ones that keep emerging. That’s a real challenge.

One of the things, just in terms of historical stuff, is to recognize that social media did not really begin to appear until around 2004 or 2005. The first 10 years or so of the internet were more involved in a much more formal way of communicating. Then, the nature of the net changed profoundly, and the expansion of these instrumentalities occurred after that. We are living in a world that’s much more prolific than it had been.

I should have mentioned this earlier…that we also established an electronic monthly way of communicating with members that we referred to as ToPNews Online. I believe that started around 1998.

What was that, Tom? I don’t remember that.

Basically, it started around 1998 and when I took over as executive director in 2000, I took the responsibility for distributing it. It was basically just quick news items, as short as possible, but then that grew and grew over time. It was done monthly. Then, we decided that it was getting so large that it was competing with our biannual newsletter.

It wasn’t really serving that much additional content, and especially with the timeliness of the content. We decided to disband the monthly biannual and make ToPNews Online our official newsletter-

Tom, if I remember correctly, ToPNews started out as distributed via a listserv.

Yes, it was a listserv distribution. Anyone, member or nonmember could simply join it. It was a monthly. I don’t remember where it was hosted. I could not find the issues from 2000 after I left the executive director position. I’m not exactly certain where STP housed it. I could not find the archives before I started as Executive Director in 2000.

Kennesaw State University originally housed it, as it did for all STP’s listservs at that time. When it started out, STP called it STP Announces.

Let’s move to another topic I wanted to discuss and that’s tracking membership.

Oh, the joys, the joys, the joys. I guess this is my turn again.

Well, you can jump in. I imagine some others can say a few things about tracking.

I’ll begin. It has been a nightmare that’s finally, I think, starting to become just a bad dream. When I started as the executive director in 2000, we had continual debates upon where to house our membership records. The reason that we had an executive director position in the first place was because STP struggled with how to reach out to non-APA members as a division of APA. Although APA permitted STP to do so, the tracking of those non-APA members was a nightmare.

At that time, APA would not do that, correct?

They could, but they were ineffective at doing it. We were never certain about the numbers that we had, and so we decided when we had the executive director position established in 2000, that I would take over the responsibility for new member recruitment and for maintaining the list of non-APA members. There were really two separate lists, one at APA for members and one in my office for nonmembers. APA would handle the subscriptions, the renewals, and they did not that well, at least not in the early 2000s. Things have changed. Ted Bosack, who was my successor, had similar issues with the membership database. I have to say this, today APA Division Services is working reasonably well with me to maintain accurate membership lists. Our difficulty today, why it’s a bad dream right now and not a nightmare, is that we’re maintaining our official membership records at APA. Whatever’s at APA is what you get for the correct email address and the correct mailing address for a member’s subscription to our journal. I also must maintain a membership database online so that members can get access to the website and the members only benefits, which are the grants and the awards. People’s emails change, and any time APA has an incorrect email, if someone does not contact APA, they will have an incorrect email in their system. APA sends me that incorrect information, so I must make sure that I am maintaining as accurate records as possible. One other complication is that some of our members join not through APA Division Services, but through the Association for Psychological Science, APS. It takes a while for APS to provide me information about the members who joined through APS and send that money to Division Services, which means that for some APS members it may take up to 2 months to process their records. I’ve been working with APA to reduce that time and we’re doing a pretty good job of that right now, but it is a larger part of my responsibilities than it was when I was first serving as executive director.

I worked with Ted as we progressed through some of those painful transitions. One of them was to take our membership database and essentially create an online database through which then we could verify membership for logging in and access to the website. That was all custom built. That was me trying to figure out how to use PHP and MySQL to retrieve dynamic information on the website. Then, we settled on a new hosting service, Wild Apricot, which is a comprehensive system for membership management system, communication, financial record keeping, and web hosting. We chose not to utilize all those features, but at some point, we gave access to APA staff who would then process the regular updates by providing information to which Tom referred. Hopefully it was accurate, but because the login was tied to email, every time an email changed, there was potentially login problems. Now, on a bigger scale, honestly there’s not a lot of content that is restricted to member access on the website, but it did create some potential problems for Ted. He always had access so he could insert somebody into the membership database on short order, if needed.

Things have changed a little bit since Jeff and Ted were involved. We’re now requiring people who are pursuing grants and awards to log in before they have access to apply, so that only STP members can do that. I am getting a lot of individuals who are contacting me to give them access. Some of the difficulties that I’m facing that are a little bit different from the ones that Jeff and Vinny were facing. One is that APA will not provide me any emails for APA members who want to restrict their email access. Email is a primary identifier, which means that I get a blank email from APA, and if you try to upload a blank email in Wild Apricot, it creates a new membership record. I found that although we have approximately 3,500–4000 members, we had 8,000 members listed in Wild Apricot. I had to cull all of that and find a strategy for creating fake email accounts for anyone who did not provide one. It’s about 130 or so members who don’t provide emails.

We can always add new members, but the purging of old members was always a challenge.

I also found that if you are in the archive, if you archive a member, they have access to uploading their archive again. I had to cull all the archives, and I’m maintaining that off-site right now.

You touched on something, Tom, that I wanted to bring up and have everybody jump in on. That’s the question of member benefits, which is another thing that has troubled STP over the decades, particularly concerning the balance between giving things away and giving something special just to our members. That also brings in, I think, issues of member recruitment too.

I’m going to jump in and say that in the period until 2005, when I was mostly involved, I was always on the side of giving away as much as possible and disseminating them as much as possible online. I think though the transition from me to Jeff was to someone who had a lot more technical abilities to be able to deal with things in this realm. I’m not quite sure how I would have been able to restrict things during that period. I don’t think I had the technical ability to be able to do that, but during that period, the other thing I think we learned in the late 90s into the early 2000s was the extraordinary difference between what the internet offered and what we did, say before electronic communication. In the year before OTRP went online, I think Marky Lloyd, OTRP director, mailed out about 300 items that people requested from OTRP, whereas by 2003 there were over 8,000 downloads. That was probably the tip of the iceberg of what later was going to be available. I don’t think we had a way of recognizing how the materials that we were providing, and they were getting richer and richer with those instructional resource awards, that they were going to make what we had to offer so much more valuable. At which point I’m going to step back because I’m not sure what happened after that.

It’s interesting because whatever decisions were made along the idea of giving something away for free as part of your membership or potentially charging people extra or more dues, it seems to me that STP had a culture, a core value, if you will, about community sharing. It was almost as if we didn’t really want to have a mindset that we could do something differently to generate additional revenue. We were a group of scholars just sharing what we could to improve the teaching of psychology. I always thought it was part of what made STP special. Now, I’m also not a big investor in the stock market either, so that might have something to do with it. I do think sharing resources openly built a community and promoted our conference programming and membership. That sharing philosophy drove everything we were doing to try and advance STP’s core mission.

I have a couple of points to make from the perspective of our current situation. Meera had mentioned that we have 10,000 Facebook members on our STP site. We only have about 3,500 members. Vinny mentioned that we have thousands of downloads from our free website. I’m sure that many of them are not members as well. I think we have given away so much for free, and people think because they are part of this larger community that they are members. How do I know that? A lot of people who try to apply for the grants and awards find out that their membership has lapsed. I am finding that out now we have award and grant applications behind a login. I’m getting people to rejoin STP after they realize that they thought they were members but no longer are. The second thing that I think has helped us is the move from our business meeting from APA to STP’s Annual Conference on Teaching. Because of that, the Executive Committee thought it was important for us to have everyone who is present be a member. We have a nonmember rate and a member rate. A lot of people joined to get the member rate, but even if you get the nonmember rate, you become a member so that you can participate in the business meeting. We are getting some individuals through that annual conference as well.

I would say in terms of recruiting members, something new that we are beginning to do is reach out to international psychologists who may be interested in teaching of psychology. I would think that that is a new direction that we have added.

Recently, the Executive Committee approved 103 free memberships for international faculty. Now, our past experience has often been that they don’t renew, but I do think it’s important for us to reach out and we’re trying to reach out to those who are on committees that are similar to STP either by programming or organizations like us in other countries.

Does anybody know how long we’ve had our current membership dues? It’s a steal, right?

It’s around 2010, maybe 2012, but we rarely have increased the membership dues. It’s $25 a year for the regular members and a reduced rate for graduate students, and retirees.

Membership dues were important in the early 90s in terms of the financial health of the society. At that time, we had to pay for each member subscription to ToP. When our publisher Lawrence Erlbaum raised the subscription rate, we would be raising dues. None of that is a factor anymore, if I understand what I’m reading in the Executive Committee minutes.

Thank you, Wayne Weiten! Somehow, he came up with an incredible contract with our publishers over the years, which has really paid off substantially for the Society.

The contract you have now is just absolutely astounding from my point of view having been around in those early days. Under the current SAGE contract, the society gets a guaranteed $165,000 a year.

And, we had a signing bonus for a recent contract extension.

I will tell you, I’m the Secretary-Treasurer of Division 26, History of Psychology, and STP’s annual income is 5 or 6 times higher than the total resources at Division 26.

The society is in an amazing position.

Although I’ll also say on the other hand it’s 9–10 times larger than Division 26. That makes certain difference.

Meera, you talked a little bit about recruiting pushes for international members. One of the other things that I noticed in going through the historical records is how recruiting efforts over the last couple of decades have evolved to focus on graduate students and early career psychologists (ECPs), much more than we attended to in the early 90s. Does anybody want to comment a little bit on that?

Sure. That’s one of the things that came to my mind as I was listening to the historical perspective. Initially, it was just like get members, build a community, and so on, but I think now there’s a lot more customization that is possible because of having an online option or having technology. For example, the STP Graduate Student Teaching Association (GSTA) has its own Facebook group. It’s something that they want to have in their own subcommunities so they can talk about things that are more relevant for them, and then the ECPs have topics and issues that are relevant to them. They write tips for ECPs for the newsletter. All of that communicates the idea that there are these subgroups, subcultures that are thinking that there are some topics that are more of a priority for us, so we can talk about it among ourselves, and then there is of course, a larger membership. I think in terms of recruitment, each of these groups reaches out to their potential members, set aside times at conferences that they might attend, events or a time when they’re available to talk to attendees. That’s one way that they can generate more interest in their group or subgroup of the larger community, I think.

It’s very impressive how much that both the GSTA and the ECP leadership has provided. They’re constantly giving me guidance. I’m so impressed by that. They are regular contributors to the STP newsletter. Not only the information that Meera mentioned, but GSTA has a blog and both ECP and GSTA have listservs. They’re not as active as they could be, but they’re there.

We’re coming back to Facebook and things like that. It seems to me that we still sponsor a lot of things like Facebook and PsychTeacher where the membership of those groups doesn’t even know that they’re participating in something that STP does.

I’m not certain as much of that Bill. I think that they know that STP is the sponsor. I’m probably the most frequent poster to PsychTeacher. I think that a lot of participants don’t know that they’re not members. That’s, I think, a bigger concern. I think, they feel part of the community, but they just don’t know that they are not actually an STP member.

What’s the solution?

What I try to do is create some amount of member only benefits through the grants and awards process. That seems to have made a difference, but it’s only those who apply that you see an impact. I’m not certain. We’ve talked a little bit in the Executive Committee about moving some of our resources to the members only login, but we’ve decided at least at this point not to do that. As Linda mentioned earlier, our community is one that wants to give psychology away. What we will do, I think we’re going to establish this next year, is to make the current issue of the STP newsletter members only, but any back issue will be available to the larger group. If you want to see the newsletter for January, you won’t be able to until February if you’re not a member.

I have some memory that there was a real tipping point around membership when we decided to have a membership status that did not require you to join APA. The cost of APA membership, especially for teachers of psychology, relative to the return on the investment, was such that we really wanted to recruit more people and not have to pay what were high membership dues to get into APA. I think we called it affiliate status. If my memory serves me correctly, we had experienced a decline in membership and affiliate status really made a difference over time. Is that an accurate reflection?

It was the late 1980s when Division 2 instituted affiliate status, but part of that was related to the formation of APS and the fact we experienced a membership decline. APA itself was losing members, and with APA losing members, we were losing members. The Executive Committee wanted to try and recapture members who may have left APA for APS. Affiliate status became part of that effort, but that affected more than just the people that we wanted to recapture that left APA. It began the move to recruiting graduate students, and it began the move to recruiting high school teachers of psychology. I think it was as early as 1991 that the number of new affiliates exceeded the number of people we were getting from APA. Affiliate status had a big impact very early on.

APA does use the term affiliate, but the Executive Committee decided that we would name all our members as members and we give them voting rights.

You must be an APA member to receive fellow status in an APA division.

Recently, we attempted to raise that issue and see if we could find some type of equivalent, like a distinguished member category. The APA Office of General Counsel told us that APA does not permit this type of naming either.

Anything else anyone wants to add?

I’ll remind you of a couple of things. At least from an historical point of view. Do you remember we had a conversation with the APA’s general counsel about the listservs? One of the things that happened, as you go into the second half of the 90s, and as the various organizations were turning toward the net, APA wasn’t sure what all the legal issues were going to be involved. One of the things that we had was a conversation; I think it involved me, you, the APA general counsel, and maybe the STP president. The issue was to be very careful of monitoring discussions on the listserv, and particularly anything having to do with politics or anything that would put the APA’s tax exemption status in jeopardy.

Now that you mentioned the listserv, it all comes back to me.

Another issue we had was to establish expected standards of behavior for members of the listserv in their communications. You may remember there were some people who were very provocative and somewhat abusive toward other list members, and eventually, I think we had to work to address that behavior in the PsychTeacher guidelines. I guess it was what we now call trolling. The third thing that we did was, since we were putting materials online and distributing them, we had to develop publication guidelines with agreements for the people who receive these instructional resource awards. We had to prepare the guidelines to make sure that they had covered the things with copyright and that everyone gave us rights to distribute things. I’m basically suggesting that one of the early things was to try to establish the very mechanisms of how these things would work because no one had ever done this before.

Vinny brings up a good point, and I’m wondering if in the more recent endeavors like Facebook and ToPIX and Twitter, are you still dealing with those issues with APA? For example, with respect to STP’s efforts on Twitter or Facebook, is there monitoring in order to prevent participants from addressing political issues?

For each of these accounts, we do have moderators who have a lot of work to do. They keep track and they monitor to make sure it is respectful, and somebody’s not getting abusive and things like that, or misusing the platform.

I believe we also have policies. I know we have policies for PsychTeacher that prohibit the use of any political or the discussion of any political content. That’s true for our social media sites, so the moderator would be familiar with guidelines.

I don’t know, Tom, if you get it, but in my role on the EC of Division 26, I still receive from APA every year a warning about, “Be careful that you don’t do anything political.” There’s usually a formal warning every year.

APA distributes a monthly or more frequent newsletter to divisions that provides that type of information.

Any closing comments anybody wants to make at this point?

It’s been a trip!

I spent yesterday afternoon going through the history of the stuff that I got involved in. I thought to myself, “How the hell did I have all the energy to do that stuff?” I was a lot younger, I guess 20, 25 years ago than I am now. I was like, “Wow, this is a whole new world.” It’s like, “Wow.”

You did pioneer an awful lot for STP on the internet, Vinny.

No, I think all the STP leaders at that time were doing lots. When you look at everything STP was doing back then, it was exploding all over the place. We haven’t even talked about the notion that STP or Division 2 seemed to be becoming an influential force in APA and could have an impact on senior leadership election results.

We’ve had good success in endorsing candidates for APA presidential vote. Jennifer Kelly, recently elected as APA president-elect, was one of two candidates that STP endorsed this year.

I just want to emphasize after listening to the historical perspective, that we should retain that feeling of community and continue to make people feel very welcome to join STP. At the annual STP conference, I’ve talked to so many people and asked them, “Have you come here before?” They said, “No, but everyone is so friendly, and this is welcoming.” I think that’s a common theme. That struck me when I joined around 2004. That’s what attracted me to STP, and I think we should keep that flavor.

For me, it was 20 years earlier and I felt the same thing as well.

I just want to have one closing thought, Bill. When I listen to Vinny say that he didn’t have the technological skills to do something, it’s hard to believe because I remember back in the day, I saw Vinny as a rock star in technology.

Except that I knew that Jeff Stowell and others, after they took over, knew so much more than I did.

Let me comment on that because I had to learn a lot of it on my own. More recently, we gave up some functionality when we moved to the new membership hosting platform and gave multiple people authorship and access without requiring specialized skills. I think that’s something that you’ve seen change across the internet—more accessible tools for a larger group of people. Thus, we’ve been able to distribute some of those responsibilities to others instead of having just one person be the key player that made us think, “How do you find a replacement?”

That makes sense.

I want to thank everyone for taking time today to participate in this discussion and contribute to our effort to explore STP’s history on the 75th anniversary of its founding.