September is the month when most Landscape Ontario’s members renew their annual membership dues. After a hectic spring and summer season, it’s a good time to reflect on the past year of membership and remember how being a part of LO has helped to get you where you are today.

When you look back at your membership year, what memories stand out? For many members, it will likely be Landscape Ontario Congress, which attracted over 12,500 landscape professionals in January. For others, the highlight may be the rewarding feeling gained by participating in a community project with your local chapter — like helping to prepare the grounds at the National Military Cemetery in Ottawa for Remembrance Day or volunteering for Upper Canada Chapter’s project at the Indigenous Food Sovereignty Gardens on Highway 15. Or maybe you remember a new skill learned at an LO training seminar or a new connection made at the Peer to Peer Network Spring Summit. Either way, I hope everyone reading this can think of at least one way their Landscape Ontario membership benefited them this past year — even if it was as simple as a nice discount on a new truck.

Building for the future

If your membership is up for renewal on Sept. 1 or later, you’ll notice the experience is a little different from what you’re used to, and the reason why is pretty important. Landscape Ontario is building a new association management system (our database) and online member portal to better serve our members. Over the next year, you’ll see some huge improvements to your online experience with Landscape Ontario. You’ll find it easier and more convenient to keep track of your membership history, update your company information (including employees) and register for events and professional development. Changes and actions that you used to have to request will soon be available at your fingertips. We’re also making a number of improvements behind the scenes that will help Landscape Ontario staff serve you more efficiently. All of this is in the pipeline, but for now, we’re excited to be rolling out a new system for membership renewals.

For many members, your membership renewal will be your first chance to interact with our new member portal. The process is easy and will only take a minute or two. You’ll receive a renewal reminder email from membership@landscapeontario.com as usual. When you click the “Renew Now” button in that email, it will open a browser window where you’ll be prompted to set a password. This will become your password for the LO member portal with your email as your username. After you set your password, a new page will open with a summary of your membership renewal, with a “Pay” button where you can renew using a credit card. Other payment methods are also available. Anytime you need to access your transaction history or past receipts, you’ll be able to find them on this page.

After renewing your membership, we strongly encourage you to look around to try out another cool feature of the new membership portal. You can now manage your company roster, ensuring your staff information is always up to date in Landscape Ontario’s member database. For companies with a dedicated accounts payable email, this will allow you to assign a dedicated billing contact separate from the person in charge of general membership management. In time, it will also help you ensure your coworkers and employees are receiving important news on topics like invasive species, government initiatives affecting our trades and upcoming training or events.

There are plenty of exciting changes on the horizon for Landscape Ontario’s online member experience. For now, we’re focusing on perfecting our renewal process, but we are continuing to build the next pieces of the new, modern membership interface. We don’t want to give too much away before it’s ready, but know that Landscape Ontario is making a big investment this year in making your online interactions with us more powerful and convenient than ever before. Click that “Renew Now” button so you can see what comes next.

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