Message from the CAMA President

Bringing Value to Membership!

Wow, has it been a hot summer! It is now mid August, and it looks like we can all look forward to “Kick Starting” our fast approaching fall season off on a positive note. As your CAMA president one of my primary goals is to retain and grow our membership. I am a firm believer that members need and want to receive long term value through supplier relationships and financially beneficial programs to support their annual membership fees. To retain members and encourage new operators and suppliers to join CAMA, we need to provide our membership with additional value-added programs. Over the past few months our board of directors have been working on a couple of new programs that we believe will bring significant value to our members. The following is a highlight of the new programs that we believe will be widely accepted and beneficial for our membership and association.

The first being a new business insurance program. In the past we have had a very good business insurance program through Pro Link Insurance brokers. Recently this program has seen its demise when the underwriting company decided to no longer underwrite insurance programs for group associations. Unfortunately, insurance companies make these decisions at random and on short notice which had left many of our members scrambling for a new business insurance policy. Group association insurance programs have proven to be a very cost-effective way of providing business insurance. We are working on a competitive replacement program that will have a solid national presence and be underwritten by an industry recognized underwriter. Stay posted for future development news.

The second is a group health benefit program. This is a new program for CAMA, and I am very excited that it will provide our members with a much needed and desired health benefit plan. Many of our members are smaller companies and have limited or no options available to them to provide their staff with group health benefits. The program that we are working on will provide a cost-effective plan with flexible options for coverages that can be tailored to suit the needs of all member companies. I believe that this program will be well received by our members. Stay posted for upcoming development news.

Let me touch base on a previous member benefit program that we had developed for our association. It was a debit / credit payment processing program with Global Payments. I know for a fact that by listening to the feedback from our members that the program was exceptional and would save our members a lot of money in processing fees. Unfortunately, not many members signed up for this program so I will only assume that it was a good tool to leverage their current providers to drop their rates. I know firsthand that it is a competitive industry, and your incumbent processor will match the association rates in a heartbeat. At least when I made the switch to support the CAMA program my current processor at the time offered to match the program rates. I declined their offer as I explained that CAMA receives a revenue stream based on all processed dollars from all members and I felt obligated to support our organization, they completely understood my position on this. It would be great if more members would review the program and see if it is a good fit for their business.

In the fall of 2019, our CAMA executive appointed a subcommittee to review our membership fee structure that had been in effect for longer than anyone could remember. We compared it too other similar associations and all agreed that it was an antiquated fee structure that needed to be revised. A new fee structure was proposed and accepted by the board of directors. It will be implemented for our 2022 renewals. The changes are not extreme in any way and more information will be released this fall prior to implementation.
Our board of directors continue to work hard to improve the value of being a CAMA member, so all we ask is that is you take the opportunity to review our value-added programs and see if they are a benefit to your company and please support our organization wherever possible. I would also like to thank all our advertisers and supporters of this newsletter and please support them in whatever way you can.

Enjoy the rest of your summer and all the best in kick starting your business this fall!