Sport Rocketry Announcement
Nearly every board of directors of organizations must make difficult financial decisions. The NAR Board of Trustees has been struggling to cope with the financial implications of changes in the age demographics of the organization, our dues structure, and rising costs. At our October Board meeting, the trustees voted to change the frequency of publication of Sport Rocketry from six issues per year to four issues per year to cut about $90,000 from our annual expenses. Additionally, the Nov/Dec 2025 issue of Sport Rocketry will be published as an online version only to reduce costs immediately. Let’s look at the details behind this decision.
Currently, we have a surge in membership in the 20–25-year-old age range. We are also experiencing a drop off in membership in our older members as many retire out of the hobby or pass away. The surge of younger members is necessary for the longer-term health of the NAR and the drop off in older members is an expected outcome of aging. Clearly, we need our younger members to remain active or come back to the hobby after taking care of the many changes in life that happen during a person’s later twenties and early thirties. The NAR Board recognizes this and is working hard to identify ways to retain and reenlist younger members. So, bottom line is that we have an increasing younger age group in the NAR and a decreasing older age group.
Our dues is tiered with four levels of dues – Juniors (<16 years) at $30, Young Adults (16-24 years) at $40, Seniors (25-69 years) at $80, and Senior Plus (>70 years) at $70. Several years ago, the NAR Board voted to expand the previous leader member category to members through the age of 24 and keep the dues significantly lower than the senior member rate to attract and keep this younger cohort. When we set the Young Adult dues at $40, this represented a financial loss for each Young Adult member, but this loss was minimal. Since that increase last year, the loss per member for Young Adults is increasing much faster than anticipated.
The costs of running the NAR business have increased faster than we can keep up given our primary source of income is member dues. Insurance last year was over $128,000. Sport Rocketry postage continues to significantly rise throughout the year and has become unpredictable for budgeting purposes.
We have three full time employees and a part time accountant who are all necessary to meet the needs of our membership – member services include maintaining our website, publishing the magazine, headquarters management, maintaining our membership records, processing high power certifications, and special projects geared to enhancing member experiences. We have a dedicated and hard-working staff who perform these necessary full-time tasks and are committed to maintaining and growing our organization. Other costs include printing and mailing member cards to senior and senior plus members, support for sections through section grants, educational program support, grants and scholarships, national launches and international programs.
Looking at all these factors combined, the Board is faced with a shrinking income and rising costs. We could increase dues across all member types, but that does not have clear financial outcomes. It is not a prudent business decision to hope that our members can absorb the cost of a dues increase. Attrition in our membership because of cost of membership is not a desired outcome. Raising dues to Young Adult members does not appear to be a viable solution, as we expect that would lead to a significant drop in Young Adult membership and hurt the organization short and long term. The Board decided that a dues increase is not a good strategy at this point.
While the Board is looking into other sources of income (grants or large foundation support), those sources are a long-term strategy that needs time to develop.
Looking at cost cutting leads us to some constraints that limit our options. Our insurance premium is a fixed cost that does not offer any room for reduction – in fact, bad claims could lead to increases, which would be difficult to absorb. Our staff work full time to meet the member needs and there is not a good path to reduce staff while maintaining the timely needs of our members. The remaining significant cost is printing and mailing Sport Rocketry.
The Board all agree that Sport Rocketry is an asset to the organization. With some minor changes to the content (like removing section lists and approved motor lists, which are available and more current on our website), we are confident that we can deliver the same volume of national event coverage, how-to articles, and other technical information in four issues per year as we did in six. We have already seen some interesting suggestions on how we could continue to publish six issues and reduce costs. Thanks for the input. Many of these suggestions have been considered as we weighed various options. We also note that the printing costs are not linear, meaning there is a large initial cost in setup that is not reduced significantly in the individual magazine cost due to the limited number we print.
As noted above, reducing printing and mailing from six to four issues will save us significant costs. The Board had a lengthy discussion about our options and found this to be the best one at this time. Additionally, to stabilize our current financial imbalance, making the Nov/Dec Sport Rocketry an online issue gives us sufficient savings to balance our budget needs.
The Board also recognizes this change will not be popular with all our members. To those members who are not happy with this decision, we apologize and ask you to at least recognize this decision was not made lightly.
Thank you for your time and please support the NAR Board as we continue to work to keep the NAR financially sound and an asset to the hobby.
John N. Hochheimer
NAR President
NAR 74537 L3