To encourage our members to complete their membership profiles, the LSA will enter all members whose profiles are complete into an annual drawing, held at the LSA Annual Meeting, where prizes will include complimentary LSA membership for a year, complimentary registration for a future Annual Meeting, and Amazon.com gift cards.  Members need not be present to win.

Members can complete their profiles by logging in to the LSA website, where a “Profile Completion Bar” will tell them how much of their profile is complete and what information needs to be supplied to complete it.   Profile information is used, anonymously, by LSA staff to provide aggregate data about membership trends, but members can choose to have only specific segments of their profile visible to other LSA members, or can opt out of being visible in the membership directory altogether.  

Please read on for more information about why the LSA requests information about its members, how we use the information, and about your options for sharing your information.  

The LSA does not require that members provide much information about themselves when they join the  LSA:  the type of membership they are purchasing, their postal address, their email address, and some basic demographic data which the member can decline to provide information about.  

But it is important for the LSA to know more about its members for several reasons:  

• It allows us to gauge more accurately who our members are, and to plan more effectively for the products, services, and benefits that will be most useful to them.
• It allows us to track demographic changes in our membership over time, allowing us to anticipate future membership trends and needs.
• It helps us to provide accurate information about our members – and, by extrapolation, about the linguistics profession.

For example, the LSA’s Committee on Ethnic Diversity has a long-standing interest in tracking the representation of various racial and ethnic categories of linguists. But without accurate data on this dimension of the LSA membership, it is impossible to learn whether we are making any progress. The same is true for other historically under-represented groups, such as women and LBGTQ+ members.

LSA members always have the option of making specific categories of information in their membership profile – contact information, professional information and demographic information – sharable with other members, and can also opt out of being listed in the member directory altogether.  Any information entered in the membership profile can be accessed by LSA staff and will be used, anonymously, to provide aggregate data about LSA members for our Annual Reports and other internal uses.

To facilitate completion of the member profile,  upon logging in to the LSA website, members will see a “Profile Completion Bar” (see screen shot below) indicating how much of their profile is completed, and what items need to be entered in order for the profile to be complete.  Members who are already logged in to the LSA website can click on the "My Account" link a the upper right of the page to see their member profiles. 

To encourage completion of the member profile, we will hold an annual drawing into which all members whose profiles are 100 percent complete will be entered.