Barbershop is back, and we're making reinstatements easier than ever
Attention all BHS chapter leaders:
Barbershop is definitely back, and we're seeing a rush of folks reinstating their memberships now that they are able to sing in their local groups again. We love that, and we’re always working on ways to support that growth - like the elimination of the reinstatement/enrollment fee at the start of the year.
Let’s take a peek behind the curtain: our business practice is to obtain chapter approval to put a person on a chapter roster once they have passed the 30-day grace period after their expiration date. With roughly 60 people a week contacting customer service to reinstate memberships that fell off during the pandemic, we’re experiencing significant delays waiting for local volunteer leaders to approve those applications.
Oftentimes, the communication gets lost in email inboxes and it takes several inquiries from customer service to garner a response. And, every chapter officer who DOES respond says, “of course they are welcome back in our chapter.”
Temporary adjustments to reinstating procedures
In order to make things as efficient as possible and get those people singing together as fast as we can, we’re making a temporary adjustment to our reinstating procedures. For the time being, customer service will assume approval to reinstate a member back into their local singing community provided their membership expired during the last 18 months. Our representatives will still send an email to notify chapter leaders of the returning member but won’t wait for a response to process the reinstatement.
This doesn’t have an impact on new members wanting to join your singing community or people who have been long absent, so if you have necessary processes (audition, costume, waiting period) those can still be carried out. Also, you can bypass the administrative wait altogether by using the Member Center to add your new and reinstating members entirely online!
Check out training for that and other helpful resources HERE. This is a temporary measure to make sure we are doing all we can to eliminate barriers to a quick return to the new normal!
Additionally, we’ve added an easy way for folks to get connected directly with their local singing community from our Member Center! An existing or prospective member can use this form to express interest in any of our chapters. That will automatically send an email to the chapter secretary on file including the name and email of the prospective member. With this one easy step, new members can learn more about your chapter, and reinstating members can ask you to start the process to get back on your roster.
Finally, please make sure that you have a chapter secretary listed for your chapter and their email is up to date. Both of these adjustments are active now, so chapter secretaries please check your emails to make sure you don’t miss anyone.