The First Fourteen Months of 2009 UCR Registration

Unregistered Carriers on 10/28/2009 - 1828
Unregistered Carriers on 10/30/2009 - 1821

I noticed today that we have registered over 1,000 carriers this month for 2009 UCR registration. That, in turn, led me to wonder what the numbers looked like for all 14 months to date. Keep in mind that these numbers are just for IL carriers we registered here in Illinois and doesn't include carriers who registered at the UCR site. Here are the numbers:

September 2008 - 4,899
October 2008 - 2,549
November 2008 - 1,418
December 2008 - 2,699
January 2009 - 959
February 2009 - 396
March 2009 - 489
April 2009 - 704
May 2009 - 595
June 2009 - 730
July 2009 - 637
August 2009 - 631
September 2009 - 985
October 2009 - 1,040

I'm still trying to figure out what to make of these numbers, but I think it's interesting that we bottomed out in February and then started picking up steam again in March. This just happens to coincide with the start of the UCR5000 project, which, you may recall, started on March 17, 2008.

So what happened upon the initiation of the UCR5000 project?

One thing did NOT happen - we never did send a mass follow-up mailing per se. In fact, the one thing we started doing in earnest was paying more attention to UCR - using numbers and specific names - and applying a steady amount of "pressure" to the whole area of unregistered carriers.

More specifically, we can identify four primary reasons why this resurgence in registration happened: 1) increased enforcement - both here in Illinois and in other states 2) the initiation of our email effort, which started with Kathy hand-crafting mass emails, and evolved to the UCR-Link Emailer 3) Bill tackling the Unregistered Carrier List and making literally thousands of calls to unregistered carriers and 4) solicitation and registration of new USDOT carriers. (We now consistently carry an 85% registration rate of new USDOT carriers, which has resulted in several thousand registrations since the beginning of 2009).

When all is said and done, I think these numbers point to the idea that if a state did one large mailing and stopped there, they may have missed a ton of carriers who, for whatever reasons, didn't register during the "first wave". Perhaps there's a case - a very real REVENUE case - to be made for persistence!