Dems Abroad Help Desk (FD)

To begin with, I'm attaching a copy of the full membership count list for Mexico. Even though you so rightfully understood that the data has changed since Feb. 1, it will be helpful for you to see the actual records linked with the figures given in that short pdf summary.

The spreadsheet is protected with a password, which I'll send in the next message immediately after this one.

You will be hearing more than you want to hear about the membership count later this fall, but if you'd already like some good summer reading, here are some pages on the wiki that give a bit of background: https://wiki.democratsabroad.org/display/MC/Membership+count+guidelines

And here are a few short explanations:

At the time of the annual membership count, to be counted, a member must:

1. Have a local address (street + city) and/or local phone number - Hence the field "missing information". On Feb.1, 49 DA MX member had incomplete addresses, today I see that this figure is at 46. I checked back on some notes and you can filter for these people using the Saved Filter: NoAddressNoPhone

2. Show on their member record some form of contact within the past 4 years. Do you remember on the training call when we talked about "logging contacts" when a member replies to an email, answers a phone call etc. People for whom we have no record of a contact are considered as having "Expired" memberships and are not included in the membership count.

3. Not be a duplicate record. If we have 2 people with the same name in the same country, only 1 record is counted. When you see these duplicates listed you should look at each one and if you can see that they are different people (ex: father and son, or simply 2 people with the same name, then you should tag them both with "Valid same name - same country" to make sure both records get counted.

 

The field "EXCLUDED" is a total of all the people not meeting the criteria above. In other words:

Excluded= total number of Mexico records, minus those with missing information, the expired membership records and duplicate records.

It's important to know, however, that these "excluded" people are full fledged members for all purposes other than the membership count. They receive our emails, they get called,  they can come to meetings, vote in the general primary, volunteer and so on (in many cases lots of these actions - like RSVP, volunteering etc. update their "last verified date" and put them back on the list of non-excluded members).

BUT  the membership count (as you will hear over and over starting next fall) is important for giving us an incentive to contact our members, make sure their information is up-to-date, and in general reach out to them.

I'm sure all this information is probably harder to digest that 3 Big Macs, but all these details are actually needed so you can understand the full picture.

Let me know if you still have any questions. We can even get skype together some time to go over these questions.