The membership fee costs less than a Netflix subscription. It’s not the cost, it’s that the perceived value doesn’t match the cost.
There are a few reasons why membership has been declining IMO:
The industry has been declining. SAF membership halved in the 80s/90s. Likely because the feds stopped timber harvesting around this time and a lot of foresters left the profession. Add the recession in the 2000s and it’s no wonder.
The average age of SAF members is 65+. They are not being replaced nearly as quickly as they are dying.
Professional associations are losing members in general. Young people make connections in other ways.
SAF’s governance and meeting structure was built based on the assumption that people have employer support to go to meetings, serve in leadership roles, attend committee meetings, etc. The feds stopped offering employer support in the recession AFAIK and I don’t get the impression many other employers do anymore either. I have tried over and over again to tell my local chapter that I cannot attend executive committee meetings/calls on weekdays during work hours and they don’t care.
SAF spends so much time catering to an older crowd that they presume is not connected to technology that they have continually missed the boat on reaching members who don’t want to pay $115/year to receive more snail mail. The digital format of the forestry source is abysmal and doesn’t allow you to share articles in any easy way (or at least it was, this may have changed).
As membership declines it becomes even harder to have meetings in person because chapter leadership roles go empty and people have to travel farther for meetings.
Most states that have professional forester certifications have their own licensing board and their own state association. People don’t want to pay for two professional associations. Though in some states this is actually swinging the other direction as some are switching to the CF license as their state license to save $.
There’s a lot more but those are the highlights IMO. There was a report put together by a membership task force on this in 2008 I believe but the board voted against taking any of their recommendations into account and it hasn’t been touched since :/