Emerts,
I am a member of both and they are very different types of organizations. VRGuild is mainly geared to real estate VT's. They are a hosting platform with posting to Realtor.com and other home destinations. The platform is template based and allows you to customize the VT for each agent and property. Once you have an agent input, on future homes you just upload the new photos and VT's. The best thing about it is the time savings for generating a tour. With the minimal money that realtors will pay this helps out. If you are doing custom work for clients then their service would not be of much help. I do not think that I have generated any new business because of my membership. As for IVRPA I have not seen any real benefits of my membership yet. The forum is not very active and they have a non member area that gets newbies and questions which you can get from many other forums for free. They claim to be promoting panoramic photography but I do not see how my potential clients will find them or me at the site. I am also a member of AIAP & PPA. The AIAP membership is starting to pan out in that I am getting requests for bids on projects from out of town clients. The PPA is not panning out as they seem to be more wedding photography oriented which I do not do. My neighbor is a member of ASMP and he claims to get about a job a month from being in their directory. I think I will dump PPA and go for ASMP soon. The only good thing that I can see so far from PPA is their insurance programs but I have not yet checked out those services. On a side note, my neighbor also does limited pay per click advertising with Google and Yahoo which he says brings him the most new business of all his marketing efforts. He is a product and corporate photographer and does not do VT's or architecture so he is chasing other types of clients.
Good Luck... TTurner
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