Chapter Leaders

Hello, Chapter Leaders,

During today's MYCLS, we promised you access to a toolkit with a full set of marketing materials. Due to some Google limitations, we must send this access out over the next five days. You should be able to click the email messaging below to start to get a feel for communications. Thank you for your patience in getting this to you access to your individualized membership lists. 

The CSTA Marketing team has developed this toolkit to help you communicate the changes to CSTA membership in the easiest way possible. Let’s talk about what’s in this kit: 

• Email templates: In this document, we have provided an email template for current CSTA+ members, basic members, and basic members who have not engaged with your chapter or CSTA (based on our data).  Active members have the value of true and non-active members have the value of false.  

• Individual email lists: Each chapter leader will be receiving access to a folder over the next 5 days. In this folder, you’ll find a copy of these email templates and a list of your chapter’s members (based on our data). Your members have been segmented by member type and engagement level. 

• Website How-To Guide - Also linked here. 

On Monday, Feb. 10, CSTA will communicate membership changes to all members. Starting on Feb. 11, we encourage each chapter to contact their members and inform them about the change using the templates. We know many of our members are best connected at the chapter level, and they may be more likely to engage with an email from you than from CSTA national. Together, we hope to reach all CSTA members — national and chapter-only —  and share our membership changes and encourage them to convert to CSTA membership.

If you have any questions or need support using these templates, comment on this post, and one of us will connect with you. Thank you for your support in developing the best and biggest CSTA community. 

Kenz Mangan, CSTA Digital Communications Coordinator 

Stacy Jeziorowski, CSTA Senior Marketing and Communications Lead

While I understand the need to go to Unified Membership, I believe that the current plan greatly devalues the role of local chapters.

I believe that the current national CSTA+ offerings do not provide adequate value for many teachers – especially those on a limited budget - and wish that national CSTA had articulated a better plan to improve those offerings to go along with the Unified Membership announcement.

Because national CSTA+ offerings are insufficient to drive much change, it needs strong local chapter support to make the (CSTA + local membership combo) appealing t to local members.   Yet local chapters will only receive $10 out of the $50 CSTA+ fee – essentially an 80% tax for all our efforts.   While it is true that a local chapter leader could spend 1-2 hours customizing and sending the e-mail templates provided, making true inroads into making CSTA+ and chapter membership a good value costs much more in time, effort, and cash on the local level than $10 per member.   While I can see how the extra effort helps national CSTA, I'm not sure what the benefit is to the local chapter.

Am happy to talk to about the situation in Washington and what we've tried over the past years to increase membership, engagement, and revenues, and how we're likely to adjust to this change. 

• There will still be the ability for teachers to have a free CSTA account. They will have access to a limited set of resources and the PD Passport. The only change that is happening is: 1. the title of CSTA Basic Membership, 2. the ability to join a chapter and affinity group, 3. access to the voice. Everything else remains the same with a free account.
• If teachers are truly unable to pay for a membership, we will have an extensive scholarship fund available. There is currently funding available through AFE, and CSTA's application is launching on Friday.
• It is critical that we do not tell teachers what they can and cannot afford or find value in, and we let them make those decisions for themselves. As a CSTA leader, we hope you find value in the membership and can communicate that value to members. If you'd like support with this, I'm happy to have this conversation offline.

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Michelle Burton
Director of Program Operations | CSTA
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