I also agree that raising dues creates a higher financial burden on dues paying brethren but I also feel that fundraisers create a burden on active brethren. Personally, if I feel it's better for everyone that can pay higher dues to pay them, than for the minority of members (you know, the active ones) to hold fundraisers.
Very true statements.
Fund raisers are actively engaged in by that small group of brothers I like to refer to as the 'gap closers'. You know, the ones we also refer to as the 'usual suspects' - the brothers that are always there turning the key in the lock and making the Lodge function. In a lodge of 50 members, I'd say there are typically between 3 and 6 such brothers - at least based on my observations of local lodges.
This small group takes on the roles required to take up the slack and close the financial gap created by other brothers that are paying what are artificially low dues based not upon the reality of operational costs involved, but rather some perceived notion of what membership should cost. These gap-closer brothers tend to burn out and disappear after awhile, as one grows weary supporting yet another house and all the burdens that come with that demand.
For decades, our dues and initiation fees were specifically called out by numerical dollar value in our bylaws. Changing them was a hassle, since a bylaw change would be voted upon by the lodge, and then sent to GL for approval. By the time you went through the exercise of getting them changed, the amount specified was already out of date. We've changed our bylaws to specify a yearly evaluation of the dues and initiation fees by a committee (consisting of officers (3) and members of the lodge (2)). This should alleviate the issue of requesting changes, but still requires the lodge to approve the committee's recommendation by vote. I'm truly hopeful that this additional freedom will help steer thing in the direction of dues that pay the bills.
Truth be known, if the GL apportionment stays the same our dues would have to double to pay our bills without fund raisers. As you can imagine, there are screams of revolt at the mention of such an increase. Myself, I don't find it to be all that bad to say that Masonry will cost me $20 a month instead of $10. I'd rather do that as opposed to keep rowing upstream in all those fund raisers.
In closing, I'd like to mention my favorite retort to those brothers that continually tell us that making the dues cover our costs would 'cost us half our membership'. If we doubled our dues and lost half our members we would _still have more money_ in our coffers to pay the bills because we'd only have half the GL apportionment to pay. Other lodges in our area that have made 'large' increases in dues haven't suffered that drastically in terms of loss - one lodge with 170 members lost two brothers through demit. It's something to think about.