The following appeared in a newsletter of a social organization: "Since membership in our organization has been declining for the past year, we need to think of new ways to attract members. We need to advertise for our organization in local magazines, as

The organization claims in an article that they need to come up with new ways to attract memberships. They reason that this is because their membership levels have been declining over the last year and that by raising awareness of their organization to the public, that they will be able to attract more members. The argument fails to mention key facts that are integral in its evaluation. The conclusion relies on assumptions for which there is no evidence; therefore the argument is weak, unconvincing, and has several major flaws.

First, the author assumes that the membership decline in the past year in related to not having enough new membership signups. Couldn't the decline in memberships be because old members are leaving? For all we know, the number of new members joining the organization could be at an all time high, but membership retention is at an all time low. This would mean that getting new memberships is not their problem, but rather keeping members is the real issue. Since we do not know if keeping memebers is there issue or not, we are unable to determine if trying to attract new members would prove the be benificial. Furthermore, the author fails to mention any other potential causes for dwindling memberships in the organization. Surely there could be many reasons why the membership levels have decreased over the last year.

Second, the writer claims that by advertising in local magazines and by partaking in public activities that this will certainly bring in new members. What is assumed here is that the reason why the organization has not been growing in the last year is because they do not have enough public awareness. In order to know if more awareness is a prudent decision, we need information on the current awareness that the organization already has. Maybe the organization is universally known in the area. We don't know with the current information provided.

Third, it is assumed that just because people hear about this social organization, that this will equate to more memberships. Although no one would join an organization that they did not know existed, just because someone is aware of something does not mean that they will do anything about it. For example, mostly everyone knows that being nice to strangers is considered "good", but this doesn't mean that everyone follows this just because they know about it. Awareness does not always equal action. In this case, by assuming that awareness improves memberships, and in actually it does not, then time and money would be wasted and the organization may be worse off than if they tried anything.

In summary, the argument is unsound and questionable. The argument could be considerably strengthened if the author clearly mentioned evidence for the unstated assumptions. In order to determine what this organization should do about its declining memberships, It is essential to have full knowledge of all of the contributing factors.