Re: [GSAS-board] Joining Member Chat

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

On Fri, 30 Nov 2007, Susan Welenofsky wrote:

> Member chat is supposed to be reserved for members only. I've been on the
> board for three or four years, and you are the only president to allow
> people to join email chat without paying. I would like to suggest that for
> interested people, you tell them to come to one of our meetings. Email chat
> is supposed to be one of perks of having a membership.

Hmm...

As the one who started the list back in 1999, I can say that it was 
*never* the intention that the member chat be reserved for members only. 
The thought was that it would help encourage more people to come to one of 
the meetings, possibly join, because people would read of goings on, what 
sort of fish folks were breeding, etc.  The archive has always been open, 
and signup has always been accessible via the GSAS page.

When you look at how much money comes in from memberships yearly (perhaps 
$750 is a liberal estimate... 50 paying members -- see footnote**) vs. how 
much is raised by the two big auctions + the meeting auctions... I think 
it's pretty clear what keeps the rent paid.

Now the intent may have been modified by later boards to be more 
exclusive, just as an attempt was made to make THIS list exclusive of all 
but current board members.  I don't remember a conscious change, though.

   - Erik

------

**FOOTNOTE: I was curious just how large the membership actually WAS these 
days, so I took a look at the database.  Wow, there's 60 active single 
memberships and 27 active family memberships.  That's pretty good, 
actually way better than it used to be.  But then I looked at the expiry 
dates on these members via the show/purge function -- itself pretty 
liberal, giving 3 months grace period. And 30-50 "current" members are 
past due, some over a year and a half past due.  So 30-50% of our current 
membership (receiving the newsletter and everything) is actually not 
paying.  Looks like nobody's been using the purge function on the 
database every month.

...but of course, if those people are getting the newsletter 
electronically, it's not really a big cost, and maybe sending them 
newsletters for an extra year might encourage them to come to a meeting 
or an auction again...

-- 
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com
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