The Natural Refrigeration

Membership in IIAR, the industrial refrigeration technical association of record, has changed since its inception nearly four decades ago. What began as a small standards-creation effort led by a group of engineers has ballooned into a community of contractors, end users, manufacturers, students and even regulators.

To keep pace with the needs of a rapidly diversifying membership, IIAR changed its membership structure in 2022, added to its member benefits in 2024, and continues to make small changes to make membership more accessible than ever.

Mike Chapman, Vice President – Operations for IIAR, said people tend to think of membership as a means to get discounted conference registration, but there is much more to it. “People aren’t completely aware of all of the benefits on offer,” he explained.

“There are a lot of resources to help our members grow professionally from a development standpoint.” One of the biggest changes this year is the student pricing fee structure, which went from $100 to $30 to make membership more affordable for students, said Lisa Berryman, Senior Operations Services Manager. She added that other member benefit additions include IIAR’s certificate course for IIAR-6 2025 in Spanish and the IIAR job board, which is intended to connect IIAR members with candidates for entry level jobs across the industry.

IIAR member benefits have grown so much in recent years, it might be tempting to pay attention to just the new benefits without exploring everything that is being offered, said Berryman.

“The biggest points are the free course offerings. A lot of people are interested in that as a benefit because the value you get for membership outweighs buying them one at a time as a nonmember,” she said. “Other benefits are free registration to our monthly webinars, access to recorded technical content from past conferences, access to all of the IIAR standards and our library of materials published in the past like IIAR bulletins.”

Berryman said IIAR’s library of superseded standards is especially valuable for members looking for context on how their technology has evolved. “Being able to tap into that knowledge base if you’re an IIAR member” is important.

Beyond benefits, IIAR’s recent membership structure change is still paying off for people who find the new process more streamlined.

“The group company membership has the best value when it comes to companies that need more than one person to have access to their benefits,” said Berryman. “We’ve recently had a lot more individual members upgrade.”

Ben Dawes, IIAR’s Advocacy and Digital Marketing Manager, agreed with Berryman. “Ever since our revamp of membership – to put one company administrator in charge of managing membership for each member company – that change alone has made things much simpler,” said Dawes.

“The main point is that we have one single company administrator now who can manage member changes, upgrades and other things on behalf of the company.” Dawes said this and other changes, like offering a job board as a member benefit, are ways to encourage people’s interest in the industry by making participation easier.

“We’ve wanted to get people in the door [by streamlining membership] and at the same time, we wanted to highlight jobs that can get people interested for the first time [in their career]. The idea is to create an easy pathway to get people into the industry.”

That growing interest is visible in the scholarship program run by the Natural Refrigeration Foundation, where scholarship applications are substantially higher this year than in previous years, an outcome Dayna Martinez, IIAR Education Programs Manager, attributes to a growing awareness of IIAR.

“There’s been an increase in interest from our student population thanks to our university engagement team and all the outreach they do. There’s definitely an increased awareness of the future this industry has to offer students,” she said.

MEMBERSHIP PRICING

IIAR has created several different membership tiers to meet a wide range of needs. Individual Company membership is a single membership where a member is registered under their company of employment.

If additional employees from the company would like to join, companies can upgrade to a Group Membership, which includes up to 25 members. If companies would like to add more than 25 employees, they can do so at a significantly discounted rate. “If they have dozens of technicians or a lot of people in the plant that can use training, the value proposition is the significant benefits for the lower cost,” Chapman said.

IIAR also offers special membership at a discounted rate to affiliates, such as regulators and first responders, academics, students, and retirees.