The Renewal Calendar

Membership Engagement Manager Declan Moorfield joins host Amara Obiledu to explain how NANA's 120-day renewal cycle actually runs, why the calls in the final 30 days matter more than the reminder emails, and what he's building next: a scoring model meant to flag a member org that's drifting before its invoice is even due.

• Declan Moorfield — Membership Engagement Manager, NANA. Runs the renewal calendar and onboarding calls; building the engagement-scoring model for the 2026 renewal cycle.

• 00:00 Intro

• 01:20 What "renewal cycle" means at NANA

• 06:40 The 120-day notice and the 60-day reminder

• 11:50 Why the last 30 days are calls, not emails

• 17:15 Onboarding a new member org in year one

• 22:30 Building the engagement-scoring model

• 27:45 What the model won't be able to do

• 30:20 Rocky Mountain's manual version of the same idea

• 33:10 Whether chapter chairs will see the score

• 35:30 Outro

Host: Declan, your title is Membership Engagement Manager, which sounds broader than "renewal calls." What's actually in your job?

Declan Moorfield: It's two things that turn out to be the same problem looked at from different ends. One is the renewal calendar — making sure an organization member renews on time, every year, on their own anniversary date. The other is onboarding, which is making sure a member that just joined actually gets value in their first 120 days, because a member who never logs in, never comes to a chapter meeting, never uses a benefit is already at risk before their first renewal ever comes up.

Host: Let's start with the calendar itself. Walk me through it.

Declan Moorfield: Every organization member has an anniversary date — billing is annual, tied to when they joined. At 120 days out from that date, they get the first renewal notice. At 60 days out, a reminder. Those are both automated, through the portal. Where my team gets involved personally is the last 30 days. If an organization hasn't responded by then, we call.

Host: Why calls, and not just a third email?

Declan Moorfield: Because a third email gets the same response rate as the first two, which is close to none. A call gets someone on the phone who can actually tell you what happened. And what happened, almost every time, isn't "we decided not to renew" — it's "the invoice went to someone who left the organization eight months ago" or "our executive director meant to approve it and it's sitting in a drafts folder." Julian, my director, put it well on an earlier episode: most non-renewals are a process failure, not a verdict. The call is what catches the process failure before it becomes a lapsed membership.

Host: How many of those calls are you personally making?

Declan Moorfield: In a given month, somewhere between fifteen and thirty, depending on where we are in the calendar relative to the mix of anniversary dates. It's not evenly spread — organizations that joined in a big recruiting push tend to cluster their anniversaries, so some months are heavier than others.

Host: You also own onboarding. What does the first 120 days look like for a brand-new member org?

Declan Moorfield: We call it within the first two weeks, not to sell anything further, just to get them set up — portal login, chapter affiliation confirmed, and one specific thing they told us they joined for, whether that's the State of Associations data, Advocacy Day, or a specific course. At day 60 we check whether they've actually used that thing. If they haven't, that's the highest-risk signal we have, and it's a much cheaper problem to fix at day 60 than at year three.

Host: That's a nice bridge into the model you're building. What is it, exactly?

Declan Moorfield: Right now, "at risk" is mostly a gut call by whoever's working the account — have they opened emails, come to a roundtable, touched the portal. I'm building a scoring model that turns those signals into a number: login frequency, event attendance, resource downloads, course enrollment, chapter meeting attendance where we have it. The goal is that instead of discovering an organization is disengaged when they don't respond to the 120-day notice, we know six months earlier and can do something about it while there's still time.

Host: What does "doing something about it" look like, practically?

Declan Moorfield: For an organization scoring low, it might be a personal check-in call from me, unprompted, well before any renewal notice goes out — not a sales call, a "how's it going, is there something you joined for that you haven't gotten to yet" call. For a chapter with the relationship, it might be the chapter chair reaching out instead of national staff, because that lands differently. The point of the score isn't to replace the calls. It's to tell us who to call and when, instead of waiting for the calendar to force the question.

Host: Where's the model right now — built, or still theoretical?

Declan Moorfield: Still being built. I'm working from about two years of portal and event data, which is enough to start testing against outcomes we already know — which organizations from 2023 and 2024 actually lapsed, and whether an early version of the score would have flagged them. The target is to have something reliable enough to run for real during the 2026 renewal cycle, not this year's.

Host: What won't the model be able to do, in your view? I ask because scoring systems tend to get oversold.

Declan Moorfield: It won't tell you why an organization is disengaged, only that they are. A low score could mean genuine dissatisfaction, or it could mean the one person who used to attend everything left the organization and nobody's picked it up. Those need completely different responses, and only a human conversation tells them apart. I'm also wary of it becoming an excuse to stop calling organizations that score fine — a high score today doesn't mean much if we go quiet on them for a year.

Host: Is there a chapter that already does something like this informally, that you've borrowed from?

Declan Moorfield: Rocky Mountain, actually, even though it's our smallest chapter at 34 organizations. Tobias Kren, the chair there, knows most of those organizations personally, so he's effectively running a manual version of engagement scoring in his head — he knows who came to the last quarterly meeting and who didn't, without any tool telling him. I can't replicate that kind of personal knowledge at Mid-Atlantic's scale, 265 organizations, but the model is really an attempt to give every chapter, even the largest ones, something closer to what Tobias already has for free.

Host: Does the chapter chair see the score directly, once it's built, or does that stay internal to your team?

Declan Moorfield: That's still an open design question, honestly. My instinct is chapter chairs should see it for their own chapter, since they're often better positioned to make the actual call than national staff is. But a score is easy to misread if you don't know what's in it, and I don't want a chair deciding an organization is a lost cause off a number they haven't been trained to interpret. Whatever we land on, there's going to be a briefing for chapter chairs before anyone outside my team gets access to it.

Host: Last one. If you had to guess the single biggest driver of non-renewal, based on everything you've seen doing this job, what would it be?

Declan Moorfield: What I just described — nobody at the organization has a reason to think about NANA between renewal notices. Not dissatisfaction, not price — just absence. Somebody joined, maybe came to one Summit, and then eighteen months go by with no reason to open an email from us. The renewal notice lands as a cold ask instead of a continuation of something. That's the gap the scoring model and the onboarding calls are both trying to close, from opposite ends of the calendar.

Host: Declan, thanks for the walkthrough. Come back once the model's running for real.

Declan Moorfield: I will — with numbers, not just a hunch.