My name is Tucker Handley, and I am the treasurer of the Ohio Program Evaluators’ Group (OPEG). I was approached by the OPEG board to serve as treasurer. Despite some initial reluctance, I accepted the position and have grown to enjoy the opportunity to work and interact with evaluation professionals throughout the state.
OPEG holds two conferences per year, with one conference in the fall and one in the spring. Benefits of OPEG membership include access to all conference materials on our website as well as the opportunity to be listed as an evaluation consultant.
OPEG has two main payment methods for membership and conference fees. Individuals and organizations can mail conference and membership payments (i.e., checks and purchase orders) to my home address. This method remains popular, especially with large institutions such as universities. In addition, people can pay conference and/or membership fees via credit card on PayPal from our website at www.opeg.org. This method is a very convenient and efficient way to collect payments, especially for large conferences (for our conference last month, 56 of 88 attendees paid via PayPal).
Hot Tip: Keep membership fees low to grow membership base – Annual membership in OPEG is $30 for professionals and $20 for students. OPEG has maintained this price for well over a decade. We did this in order to encourage evaluators to join the organization and have an ongoing relationship with OPEG over time rather than just attending an occasional conference. Establishing a lower student rate encourages students to join the organization and hopefully maintain their membership after graduation.
Hot Tip: Consider using PayPal or other online ‘shopping cart’ service as a means of payment – I find PayPal and easy and convenient way to collect membership fees and conference registrations from my computer. However, the processing fees per transaction add up over time (PayPal charges a fee of between 3-4% of the transaction amount), and PayPal has a 3-4 day processing delay in transferring funds from our PayPal account to our bank account.
Hot Tip: Registration for OPEG’s interactive and experiential October 13th Fall Workshop, Embracing Change through Evaluation, is now open at www.OPEG.org.
The American Evaluation Association is celebrating the Ohio Program Evaluators’ Group (OPEG) Affiliate Week with our colleagues in the OPEG AEA Affiliate. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our OPEG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.