A key report tracking membership trends is out, and the news, this time around, is a little mixed.

The 2015 “Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report,” released by Marketing General Inc. (MGI), analyzed and compared membership trends from 914 organizations. A couple of key points of note from this year’s report:

Forty-six percent of respondents said they’d had growth in their membership over the last year. That’s down from the 53 percent that experienced growth in 2014.

Of the associations seeing member growth, 72 percent of the growth came from new members, and 37 percent came from member renewals.

The study also includes data on recruitment, awareness, social media work, paid dues structures, and association management.

The report is downloadable for free over at the Membership Marketing Blog.

Quote of the Day

Work interruptions can be serious. Gloria Mark, a professor in the informatics department at the University of California at Irvine, studies the cost of task switching.

Here’s what Mark had to say about the matter in an interview with Fast Company‘s Kermit Pattison:

“We found there is significantly more stress. We did a laboratory experiment where people did a typical office task. … We used a NASA workload scale, which measures various dimensions of stress, and we found that people scored significantly higher when interrupted. They had higher levels of stress, frustration, mental effort, feeling of time pressure and mental workload. So that’s the cost.”

Some people offset stress by working faster, or avoiding interruptions that require a lot of work and deviation from the current task—or they just work from where they can focus.

Other Links of Note

Are you about to collaborate with someone? John Antanaitis, Polycom’s vice president of solution marketing, wrote of several ways to make sure the partnership works. Head over to CMSWire to find out what he said.

Education can help enhance your organization—for your employees and your members. Tagoras’ Jeff Cobb has a few starting points for boosting your continuing education and professional development offerings.

It’s hot. Hot, hot, hot. And—if you’re in the right place—the air conditioning is keeping things cool. Inc. writer Anna Hensel highlights how frigid temperatures really help the office.