2023 Membership renewals and support
Jess Palfreyman, Membership and Systems Office
As the new year approaches, for many of our members so does membership renewal time.
Over 55% of our members still renew in January each year. If you are due to renew in December or January, you can renew online now, or pay by BACs or over the phone.
If you have any trouble at all, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at membership@trees.org.uk or via phone on 01242 522152 option 1.
Each autumn we at HQ have to sit down and agree membership fees for the coming year and this year, of course, it’s been very difficult. After a lot of discussion about our options we elected to keep our fees as low as we possibly could – at a maximum increase of 5% across all our membership grades, as John mentioned in his article on page 5 of the ARB Magazine. We hope this will help our members continue their membership for next year, whilst enabling us to keep the lights on at HQ and keep developing new resources for the arboricultural community.
Support
We’re also able to offer some additional assistance to those who would like to continue their membership but are struggling financially. Please contact us via phone or email if you’d like to have a confidential chat about your situation. We don’t want any member to feel compelled to cancel their membership due to the cost-of-living crisis. We’re also available to have a chat about upgrades, downgrades and CPD – so please just get in touch.
For those of you who may be struggling with more than just paying your membership fees this winter, please don’t forget our partner Perennial is there to offer advice and support to anyone working in arboriculture or horticulture in the UK – www.perennial.org.uk. They understand our industry and can offer brilliant tailored advice, so please make use of their services if you need them.
CPD
Winter is also a good time to look at logging the last year’s CPD and starting to plan for the next year. With both business and personal finances potentially becoming more restricted, careful planning and evaluation of your past CPD will help you make the most of your training opportunities.
Look at what you most enjoyed and found most effective as a learning method (if you hate conferences, don’t plan to make up all of your CPD using them). You should also think about where the gaps are in your knowledge, or which areas you would like to build on, and then look for training opportunities that match those requirements. The best CPD is the CPD you actually want to complete!
We’re going to launch a new winter webinar series in December which will give you lots of free opportunities to brush up on different subjects and the 2023 training calendar will be launched in December too, so you can start booking your training well in advance.
This article was taken from Issue 199 Winter 2022 of the ARB Magazine, which is available to view free to members by simply logging in to the website and viewing your profile area.