Dear Presidents and Secretaries of the National Societies,
Dear Secretariats,

This email is to inform you that as of January 2020, the ESA will update its procedure regarding the ESA associate membership of your society’s members.

First of all, please note that it is mandatory for ESA, as a society managing and processing data, to be GDPR compliant.

This means we need to have a signed Data Processing Agreement with each national society in order to proceed its data. Therefore, we kindly ask you, if not already done, to send us back the Data Processing Agreement completed and signed.

Secondly, we slightly adapted some points of the original procedure below.
Changes are highlighted in bold:

1. The National Society (NAS) asks its members for explicit approval to become ESA associate member and to share his/her information details with the ESA (opt-in) OR the NAS informs its members that the data will be shared with ESA (opt-out)

If you prefer the first option, we send you enclosed an example of a consent template that could be used (but possibly you use an automated process where you ask for approval).

2. The NAS sends the list of members to become ESA associate member to ESA (esamember@esahq.org) 2 times a year: in January and in June via the enclosed excel file.

The June list should preferably not contain the members appearing in the January list.

The members of both lists will receive a 2 calendar year membership beginning in the same year. For example, if you send us your member lists in January and June 2020, their ESA membership will be valid from 1st January 2020 to 31 December 2021 (2 calendar years).

We encourage you to use the excel file attached which really eases processing your list in our database.

If you have a new list of members please keep it until January, so that your members will receive their membership as of 2020.

3. ESA will import the associate members 2 times a year in its database creating associate members with an incomplete profile (associate membership runs for up to 2 calendar years, afterwards associate membership needs to be renewed via the NAS).
4. ESA will send the associate members a welcome letter (enclosed fyi) with the request to complete their profile and accept to receive communications from ESA. Only when this is done, ESA can send communications to the associate members.
5. To those who haven’t completed their profile, ESA sends reminders in the course of maximum 2 years.
6. One month before the associate membership expires, ESA sends a communication to the associate members that they should contact their national society if they wish to remain ESA associate member.

Via this link you can consult the membership catalogue including the benefits for associate members. Feel free to share it with your members.
Important note: if someone is already an ESA active member, he/she will not lose this status and benefits related to this active membership when becoming associate member (which comes on top).

In case of any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

We thank you very much for your understanding and look forward to continue our collaboration between our societies.

Kind regards,

Aude Quivy
Marketing and External Relations Coordinator
T+ 32 (0) 2 250 30 57
aude.quivy@esahq.org