from jack (multi-year memberships)

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

Jack sent this yesterday, but from a different e-mail address than he's 
subscribed with (reminder... don't do this... this is how we keep 
spam out of the list):

I was glad to see Diana's concerns about multi-year memeberships posted.
Mike pretty much said what I was going to say in reply.

As Mike noted, multi-year memberships make our job easier and for that
reason our membership forms have been actively promoting them.  And it's
not very much money, even for a 3-year membership.  But the PAM situation
is a cautionary tale.

Regarding putting membership expiration on the labels, I tried it when
I was printing the labels myself but soon backed off because our older
data was by date, whereas my entries indicated which volume/number
would be the last recieved.  This only highlighted the problems that we
were having getting out an issue on time.  Now, most of the entries
(except for the PAM people) are entered by vol/no and not by date.

For the last 2 years or so we have had outside people do the labels.
In fact, there have been at least 3 different firms involved, two
of which made many mistakes in the addresses.  I never was given time
to train them on the renewal info (always a panic!) and wouldn't have
trusted them to get it right anyway.  If we get a stable relationship
with a printer/mailing service, I'll give it a try.

- Jack


-- 
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com