Community Learning Development Resource 103-07
‘PROVIDER RETENTION’ VERSUS CLIENT PROGRESSION
Summary
The mission of many community-based groups, voluntary organisations and many agencies and providers, is to recruit people into their organisation and provision, and thus increase their numbers of participants. The success of the organisation may depend upon having numbers of people and success may be measured in numbers of participants or members. This may constrain the potential for individuals to choose to progress and move on. How can we assure client-centredness and responsiveness to client desires and choice?
The issues
- Retention is a common measure of the successful participation by people in any activity or group – from start to completion and the reward to the organisation in terms of status or as resource (funding) may be at least partly determined by retention rates. ‘Retention’, particularly within non-educational settings can also mean that providers are seeking to retain learners as members of their organisations.
- There may be a conflict for many organisations – community groups, agencies and providers, between their concern to maintain an individuals’ membership of their provision and the individual’s needs, options and choices, as a learner, to move on, which threatens to take them out of the organisation and on to another.
- The mission of most community-based groups, and many agencies and providers, includes recruiting people into their organisation and provision, and thus increasing their number of participants, and their success is measured on the basis of membership, attendance and retention.
- Retention means successfully sustaining membership and keeping individual members. Learning completion and progression by members, in this context may be outcomes, neither desired nor understood by the provider. Learner progression may not be anticipated, encouraged or supported. Progression may even be actively discouraged and individual choice constrained
- Developments may be sought, within an organisation, which will address emerging needs and enable the participants to be retained, even when the viability of such a development is marginal, inappropriate or impossible, and the needs of the participants could be addressed better elsewhere. Other providers may not be seen as a preferred or more suitable choice for learners
- Moving-on by individuals seems to be acceptable where this means moving further into the organisation, e.g., from being a newcomer to being an active member; from potential learner to existing learner; from first steps to mainstream; from lower level to higher level
- There can be real problems for partnership working with retention prompting fears in partners of the loss of members to partner organisations and what is perceived as ‘member poaching’.
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