New Membership System
We are making good progress with the migration to our new membership system (as announced in SWOAPG Membership System Changes) – just in time, as LoveAdmin recently announced an (unexpected) leap in their fees to £50 a month (instead of a few pounds at most), which we should now be able to avoid! Membership data for most of our Full Members has now been migrated (we’re just resolving a few duplicate e-mail address issues) and we’ll be working on our other membership categories over the coming weeks.
Membership Fees & Renewals
Those of you who attended our AGM (or completed our SWOAPG Membership Fees: Would you rather… survey in October) will be aware that we were considering re-structuring our fees this year, with a lower ‘core’ membership fee and optional ‘add-ons’ for sign-up to venue access concordats – at least in part because we hoped to have the River Wye Glasbury-Hay concordat in place by now. Sadly, that has not yet come to pass (which is a whole other story…) and we don’t have enough information about venue use to feel confident making this change right now. We will explore this option further over the coming year, but in the meantime:
Our 2024/5 Membership Fees will be £94 for Full Members; £32 for Associate Members (adjusted for inflation, as agreed in 2017).
Those of our Full Members whose accounts have been migrated to the new system (you’ll have recently received a ‘Welcome to South Wales Outdoor Activity Providers Group’ e-mail) can now renew your membership:
- login using your provider account,
- then Apply for Membership;
- pay by card via PayPal, or choose the ‘other’ option (and drop us an e-mail) to pay by BACS or invoice.
Associate Membership renewals will follow in due course. Please bear with us if there are teething problems with this new system…
Gorge Access and Training
We will not be asking gorge users to complete a new Code of Conduct training course for 2024, since not much has changed over the last year (and we have enough to do without creating another course!). We will, however, be asking providers to confirm their annual gorge ‘sign-up’ in the usual way (and to remind all their gorge leaders that they do need to keep up-to-date). Watch this space for notification of the sign-up form in due course – and if we don’t get new ID cards out to you by 1 April, please keep using last year’s for the time being…