Geological Society of America
A member who doesn't renew is rarely telling you why; they're busy, between jobs, or waiting on a department that never approved the invoice. Some don't even know they've lapsed. None of that reaches the association, because a renewal notice doesn't ask anything, it just states a deadline and hopes. What if it asked instead, and kept asking, in a way that makes it easy to answer, until it actually gets an answer?
- Association Type: Scientific society with individual membership.
- About the Organization: The Geological Society of America runs continuous renewal and lapsed member check-ins with PropFuel as a managed services account.
The Challenge
Renewal season at GSA isn't a season. Membership runs on each member's own anniversary, so someone who joined in April renews the following April. The bulk lands in November, but there's no single date to build a campaign around. Anything GSA sends has to run all year and know who's already paid.
The gap in GSA’s tech stack was that drip emails can only talk at members, not converse with them. Jason G. Elkins, GSA's Director of Marketing and Communications, described the society's own drip emails plainly while planning what to build next: "Right now we have five or six emails that go out in a drip, but we're not getting engagement from them." Five or six emails, and no way to tell which members were about to leave, or why.
The Solution
So GSA built a PropFuel sequence that treats a "no" as an opportunity for information capture instead of a dead end. A member is enrolled 60 days before their membership expires, and over the following months, every "not yet" or "no" gets asked why; budget, unused benefits, retirement, having left the field. Each reason routes somewhere different instead of just landing in a report.
The questions change shape as the moment changes too. Early on it's a simple yes or no on renewing. Later, once a softer ask hasn't worked, it gets more direct: “what's actually holding you back?” And for members who've already lapsed, the sequence doesn't assume they know they’ve lapsed, it checks. Timing the ask to where each member actually is in that journey is what turned members who appeared lost into members who came back.
The Results
- ✅ 1,078 renewals and counting – the running total this campaign has recovered since it went live in June 2025.
- ✅ 14.4% average response rate – ahead of PropFuel's own 10% 90-day benchmark.
- ✅ 701 members went from unsure to renewed – after a series of nurture emails understanding member needs, 69% of members who weren’t committed to renewing eventually signed on for another year.
- ✅ 50% of members who lapsed didn’t even know it – after four earlier check-ins about renewing, over half the members still in the sequence had no idea they were already gone. PropFuel brought them back into the fold.
Why It Worked
- GSA used the "no’s" as opportunities for information capture, not a dead end. Budget, unused benefits, retirement, having left the field, etc. Each reason is a different problem, and each one routes members to a different follow-up instead of another generic reminder.
- Ask something different every time. Repeating "are you renewing?" five times reads as nagging. Changing the question, first a yes or no, then a reason, then a direct ask, then a lapse check, kept people answering instead of tuning out.
- Timing matters as much as the question. The same question lands differently depending on where a member is in their journey. Asking directly worked better once a softer ask had already failed. Checking for lapse-awareness worked because it came last, once assuming a member "already knew" had run out of road.
- Run it on the member's calendar, not GSA's. Anniversary renewals for GSA don't fit a season, so the sequence automatically enrolls each member 60 days out and lets their unique renewal date control the scheduling.
What's Ahead
GSA has no new member onboarding campaign yet, and that's the next build. The plan is to split it by member type, students, early career, and professionals, and ask new members why they joined so the answer shapes what they hear all year. Check-ins after section meetings are planned too, along with a direct link to scholarships and foundation grants inside the budget branch. None of it has run yet.
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