Newsletter
Volume 29 | 2006 | Number 3
ABA Now and in Days to Come: News from the ABA Executive Council
By Dr. Thomas Critchfield, ABA President
ABA Now
Any view of the future begins with an assessment of the status quo, and the data describing ABA are mostly good. During the coming year our membership will surpass 5,000, which represents growth of 160% since 1994 – more than 10 times the mean of comparable organizations. The response to the 2007 convention call for papers set an ABA record for number of submissions, and the event itself likely will attract a record number of registrants. During the early 1990s, ABA expenditures far exceeded income, making survival from year to year a primary concern. Now, thanks to growth in the field and remarkable management by Executive Director Maria Malott, ABA is solvent and therefore able to think strategically. When I served as a Student Representative to the Council in the late 1980s, ABA was smaller and planning was handled somewhat casually. Contemporary Councils represent a larger and more diverse membership whose needs are more difficult to anticipate – hence my emphasis on data in the preceding paragraph. A great deal of effort is expended each year to make sure that Council members have at their disposal as much information as possible about the Association and factors that affect it. You may have noticed, for instance, that in recent years ABA has surveyed its members on a regular basis. Your responses to these surveys are, quite literally, the Council’s window to your world. A major behind-the-scenes development occurred in 2006 when ABA began working with a survey research firm to help assure that surveys are well constructed, tap into a representative portion of the membership, and are properly interpreted. The most recent survey asked about member satisfaction with 14 current ABA services. The survey was sent to all members with a valid electronic mail address on file, and elicited responses from about 12% of the members in each of several membership categories (e.g., consultant/staff trainer, professor/academic, psychologist/therapist, student, etc.). Although there is no way to assure a fully representative sample within each member category (members may respond or not as they please), survey professionals regard this as an adequate sample. Overall, you told us that ABA is doing a pretty good job. For every service, at least 87% of members indicated that they were very, or somewhat, satisfied; Figure 1 shows illustrative results. Remarkably, a detailed analysis revealed consistently positive appraisals across all segments of the membership (not shown in the figure).
Figure 1. Percent of survey respondents who were very or somewhat satisfied with selected ABA initiatives.
Another important piece of the status quo is that ABA has been very careful with money. Among several dozen comparable professional organizations, ABA ranks near the top in terms of administrative efficiency. To illustrate, consider that comparable organizations employ one full-time staff member for about every 165 convention registrants. In 2006, ABA’s ratio was 1:333, for roughly double the efficiency. Perhaps not coincidentally, ABA’s membership dues and convention registration fees are among the lowest for associations of comparable size and scope.