Board Response to Information Request

Coffee Pot and Water Cooler
21

I keep saying that the IES has a model worth checking out.

The Illuminating Engineering Society sells sustaining membership tiers to businesses and organizations that choose to do so, and each tier offers a certain number of benefits including a certain number of free simultaneous logins to the Lighting Library. For example, the top tier, the “Diamond” tier at $25,000 offers:

  • Tax Deduction: $18,140 USD
  • Free simultaneous logins for the Lighting Library: 15
  • 10% discounts for individual employee memberships: 500
  • Free webinar registrations: 15
  • 10% discount on Lighting Conference/Street and Area Lighting Conference/Research
  • Symposium registrations: 50
  • 10% discount for “new” individual non-employee memberships: 50
  • Exclusive discounted rates to sponsor/exhibit at the Lighting Conference or SALC: Yes
  • Priority placement for exhibit/tabletops: Yes
  • Light for Life® Virtual Symposiums Registration: 2 Complimentary
  • Free Website banner advert for 6 months worth $4,200 USD: Yes
  • LC Study Group 10% discounts: 10
  • Exclusive concierge email for personal response: Yes
  • Apply for IES Continuing Education Units (CEUs) for in-person presentations to deliver to your customers: Included
  • Free access to the Introduction to Lighting course: 100
  • Your own branded IES ELearning Channel (up to 10 hrs/20 videos): Yes
  • Listing in LD+A: Yes

There are currently four Diamond Level Sustaining Members: Acuity Brands, Copper Lighting Solutions, Signify, and Sonepar There are two Platinum ($13,000), nine Gold, ($7,100; Gold is the first level in which design firms are represented) and a LOT of Silver ($3,700) and Bronze ($1,350). At the Bronze level, you get two simultaneous logins to the Lighting Library, and 10% discount for 5 individual employee memberships. (Most employees still have to join; a very limited number at each level are umbrellaed in under the Sustaining Membership, and then at the Sustaining members discretion.)

Honestly, I am not sure that CSI offers anything like that. And if it does, what companies they might be. It is not clear from the CSI website. (It is VERY CLEAR at the IES website.)

(FWIW, IES individual memberships are $245. As a member, the subscription rate for the Lighting Library is $249; for non-members, the subscription rate is $549. Which makes it more cost effective to JOIN and to subscribe than to subscribe alone.)

Worth noting is that some of the benefits help the sustaining members promote employee engagement that should bring money to the IES: join the IES, pursue the LC credential, attend SALC, register for CEUs.

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22

What I find particularly interesting about CSI’s argument that other organizations charge that way is the comparison to what they have to offer.

CSI has a monopoly on a list of numbers and they want to charge a fortune (depending on firm revenue - some big firms could be $100k+) for access to that list of numbers.

Many of the organizations listed above have literally thousands of pages of relevant codes and standards among a whole lot of other things that are useful in our work. Also, even with those expensive revenue based organizations, there is the option of joining an affordable code subscription service and getting access to that information.

One of these things is not like the other. Greed is an ugly thing.

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23

It must also be stated that CSI has, for many years, ACTIVELY ENCOURAGED the dissemination of said list of numbers to ease the transition from '95 to '04. There was the transition matrix document, the numbers and titles, countless little tools to encourage the industry to adopt the new standard. All courtesy of the official CSI website. If CSI knew that the numbers themselves was what had value, they should have kept it under lock and key from day one. Unfortunately, they now want to backtrack on 20+ years of their own guidance and pretend we are all amnesiacs.

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