In July of 1996, the board created the position of "membership chair" and appointed Jim Reuter (omni) to the job. I don't exactly remember the job description, but I think the idea was that this person would coordinate recruiting members, just as the "publicity chair" coordinates publicity. Not much has happened since then - neither the board nor Jim nor anyone else has done much, partly because we don't really know what to do. But it's an issue we have to deal with. To quote Mark Conger: > Our membership rates have been basically constant for the last 3+ years. > (I verified this when I did the financial research for the 501(c)3 > application.) But our operating expenses have gone up quite a bit in > the last year, thanks to the ISDN line, and some increases in our phone > rates. As a result we are depending on other sources (i.e. the auction, > and this fundraiser) for some of our income. When Mark says the "membership rate" has been constant, I think he means the absolute number of members, not the percentage of our users who become members. Though our number of users has risen high, the number of members has not. I think we are really at a stage now where to get Grex on a sustainable footing, we need to increase the number of members, or in other ways find more steady sources of income. Having to do fundraisers for such basic things as spare parts for our computer is not a good thing. How do we do that?50 responses total.
Short term trial membership drive with reduced rates? Say, $4/month for up to three months, available only during such-and-such a three week or month period....
the student discount on m-net is what first got me started there.
When were grex's membership dues last raised? I would not mind paying up to $10/month, with student memberships at $5/month, four-year max. But I am sure most students could also afford the $10 (they probably spend that much in restaurants every week). Is there any extra benefit that could be offered to anyone who paid $10?
Publicity and appeals should be tried before raising dues (actually, I am unclear on how raising dues will increase membership).
I would humbly suggest that "students" as a group are neither more or less affluent that most other Grexers. I'd much rather see us set a suggested "low-income" membership that would help community users who dont have access to one of the best computer labs in the world.
focusing relatively low-tech computer service suport drives on UM students is like trying to sell a ford escort to someone who gets free corvettes. setting up a sliding scale or low-income membership is a little redundant for Grex. lower introductory rates have interest-raising value, and convenient ephemerality.
And I don't think Grex's membership-donation level has *ever* been increased, for whatever that's worth.
I think we need to be careful to attract members who are into donating not buying service or perks. We don't need voting members who see us as a cheap ISP. Our weakest link right now isn't money or members but enough (more) qualified volunteer staff. We had the money to buy a new computer but not the staff time to put it online for far too long.
I certainly agree with Mary that I would rather not increase the amount of Perks we give out, and I get tired of answering all the mail I get saying "If I become a member, can I run eggdrop?" from people who think membership is about buying service. However, I disagree that money is not a problem. We had enough to buy the new computer, yes, because a lot of people thought the idea was exciting and worth contributing to, through a fundraiser. The same thing happened when we had a fundraiser for the ISDN lines, though we took a bath on the installation costs, so the fundraiser didn't cover them. But now we are having a fundraiser for some more mundane items, spare parts and a mail machine, and we are well short of paying for them. So some of the money will have to come out of the general fund, most likely. If we could pay for all capital improvements (including the boring ones) through fundraisers, then dues (at the level thery're at now) would just barely cover our operating expenses. But not only is it rather annoying to keep begging for money every couple of months, it doesn't seem to work very well if we go to that well too often. It seems pretty simple to me: our operating expenses have increased (as has our level of operation), so we need more regular income to cover them. That means either getting more members or raising dues. I certainly hope we don't have to raise dues; I think there must be people using Grex who are willing to contribute but haven't done so yet. As I said in another item, if we could get 20 new members, I'd sleep a lot better.
More qualified staff would come along with more members if the attractions of membership are kept the same (participation). Getting the "word" around is the best way to go, IMO. Re #5: we have a "low income" participation rate - $0. Non-membership isn't a blemish on anyone. Membership is a designation that goes with financial support. In regard to lower "introductory" rates - we have those now. We just don't have the higher "regular" rates yet.
Rane suggested in another item that we might send mail to people who have been on Grex for 6 months. Is there a way (technically, I mean) to identify all the people who are just passing their 6 month anniversary?
Rather than tying up space with reiterating my previous offer (which those of you who read backward will see in a moment) I'll reiterate that I made it and suggest that this may be the place to discuss it ;)
Basically, we need to bring in a bit more money to support things as we stand.
We aren't living beyond our means now, but we are living close to our limit.
So what are the ways we can raise more money?
- Raise membership rates. This increases the barriers to becoming a
full participant in the governance of Grex. This makes Grex a worse
place.
- Hold more fund raisers. This means constant solicitations for money
which seem to work well only if we are raising money for something like
a faster net connection or a faster computer. The current mail machine
project will make Grex faster, but nobody cares because Grex is already
fast. Having all those fundraisers doesn't make Grex a nicer place.
- Selling more T-shirts and stuff. This is a good idea. We haven't really
marketed t-shirts to the party crowd very effectively. We could try to
come up with a cool T-shirt design that is more marketable to non-Grex
computer users and try to squeeze some money out of the non-Grex geek
market. Pushing T-shirts harder as means subjecting our users to more
solicitations, though they get something more substantial and it is
kind of cool from a community standpoint to have Grexers walking around
in Grex colors.
- Selling more memberships. Again, this means soliciting more users for
more money, with all the same negatives as the last two options. On the
plus side, it may draw people into more active participation in the
Grex community.
I think we should be doing things on several of these things. Continue to
hold fundraisers. Definately market T-shirts harder. Definately do a push
on marketing memberships.
I've thought of generating a list of long-time users who are not members,
and writing personal E-mail messages (not a form letter) to each of them,
encouraging them to consider helping to support Grex if they are able.
Misti's idea of an e-mail wrapper that solicits membership from non-members (if I understand correctly) seems a reasonable thing to try. Many non-member users would ignore it, some would 'see the light' and join, and maybe some would join to stop the wrapper!
To Jan's list I would add:
- Push the auctions harder, so we get more donors and more bidders. This
has the same drawbacks as the other solicitations, but at least it has a
semblance of fun about it. My parents told me that their church auction
grossed over $26,000 this year - and it's not a big church! People
donated items like a weekend at their summer cottage, a cruise on the
Concord River, with lunch for 18 people, a fancy brunch for 8, and lots
of furniture and stuff. I imagine the level of income of their church
members is higher than that of the average Grexer, but it's really the
commitment that impresses me - apparently people got really caught up in
the thing and donated a lot and spent a lot. It's conceivable to me that
we could generate that kind of excitement for our Grex auction, but I
don't really know how to go about exciting people.
I'd still like to hear from a staff person as to how easy it is to identify
the people who are just passing their 6-month anniversary.
I like the idea of telling non-members about becoming members through regular e-mail, with or without using the wrapper idea. One person I know says he no longer uses Grex because of what he calls the "Queue from Doom." What would happen if we said that members who telnet in wouldn't have to wait through the queue?
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I think it would be fair to let paying members go to the front of the queue. If more people became members, would it be possible to pay for more telnet lines (or whatever they are called)? And guarantee to maintain a certain number per member? If I were not a member, I would certainly think it were fair to let members go first. (Or maybe the number of people who can telnet in is limited by the size of the grex hardware?)
i think a wrapper on mail/elm/pine and party resembling a shareware registration reminder would be great. just a brief reminder suggesting that a donation will help support the service, and as an added bonus, the annoying reminder message will go away.
I oppose letting members jump the queue. For one thing, the queue is not a serious problem - if it is long, I have loads of other things to do while it shortens, and others can too. Most important, though, I do not think we should be trying to invent perqs for members, but rather we should be trying to "sell" the community-directed, charitable, nature of the operation.
"telnet lines" are not something that we pay for a set amount of. We have a certain amount of bandwidth (128 kilobits per second) that can be transferred between Grex and the Internet. This is shared by telnet, mail, and anything else anybody does over Grex's Internet connection. If we cram more stuff down it than will fit, it will still work to a point, but it will get slow. The same goes for Grex's hardware. The more stuff we make it do, the slower it will be for each individual task. What this means is that, given some money, we can't just go out and "buy more telnet lines." We can do some upgrades that will make us able to handle larger numbers of users well, but that gets quite expensive. If nothing else, that's because we are paying well below market rates for the Internet connection right now, so doubling the connection speed would likely do a lot more than just double the cost. I would also oppose giving members priority when telnetting in. That's something we've generally tried hard to avoid on Grex, and it has worked pretty well. M-Net has tried opening more ports to paying users, and has marketed their various support options as ways to get better access. That has done some rather destructive things over there, in terms of getting people to see giving money as a purchase of services, rather than as a donation. When people purchase services, they expect more reliability and support than a volunteer staff can comfortably give. It also causes people who don't need the extra services to not see as much of a point in donating.
It would be technically hard to teach telnet to let paying members "jump" the queue. telnetd doesn't currently have any way to ask a user for a password or a loginid. The solution that's used on m-net is to allocate multiple IP addresses, some of which are "members" or "patrons" only; but aside from being a really ugly solution, sunos just plain doesn't support it. The multiple IP address scheme also doesn't really map in well to our future plans for grex; we hope to migrate grex to a distributed computing environment, and this is a kludge that just doesn't fit.
Quite aside from the technical difficulties, I agree with those who say heading down the path of more perqs for members is going in the wrong direction. I think people need to join us because of what Grex provides for the community rather than for it provides for them personally. Otherwise we dance pretty close to the "pay for service" cliff and I think we're likely to get cremed if we go over.
Hmm. I was going to ask questions about implementation, but Marcus answered them pretty well. Even apart from technical feasibility, I'd be dead set against that kind of membership perq. Bleah.
Yep, I one thing I REALLY like about grex is the fact that we are a coop with a low-income membership ($0) and a modest-income membership ($6/month). And being a low-income member doesnt give you a much different set of options. Let's keep the difference as small as possible.
The multiple IP address in a distributed environment wouldn't be a huge problem, I think. We could just give each login machine multiple IP addresses. We are still stuck with the other technical limitations. Still, even if we could do this easily technically, I would think it is a bad idea.
Is it possible to purchase more bandwidth, in case more people decided to join and we therefore had more money? What does the internet connection cost?
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Is it possible to install a second computer just for party? What are most users doing on grex at any particular time? At $225/month, with 112 members it would be an extra $2/month. Are there members who cannot afford $2/month to double internet bandwidth? Excuse me if I am asking stupid questions, I don't know how grex works.
Grex is certainly likely to evolve toward using multiple servers for different purposes. However, it isn't likely to do so unless we can find ways to bring in a bit more steady income.
$225 per month would give us the same speed Internet connection we have now, at market rates. To double that capacity, we would have to at least double the $225 per month, since the line costs from Ameritech go way once you get past the ISDN and DS0 range.
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I had thought there was some sort of longish wait to telnet in, and that it might be possible to shorten it somehow by improving the internet connection. But I will leave those decisions to the experts. Will go try w and see if I can understand what it gives me.
The wait to get in is artifical; we added it. Before that, people would just get a failure when trying to connect at peak useage times. Grex has a limited number of telnet connections available; this is partially an operating system limitation, but one we take advantage of by only allowing a certain number of telnet sessions at once. If we didn't limit the number of simultaneous connections, the Grex CPU would run excessively slow trying to run everybody's processes. Therefore, we only allow a certain number of people at once.
Is there some way to let the CPu handle more processes at once by using a second machine for some of them?
I'd like to steer this item back in the direction of ideas for getting more members, if possible, and ask that if folks want to discuss technical ways to make Grex faster or more accessible, they take it to a separate item. I feel kind of bad about this, because I know that when danr was treasurer, he took a much more active role in trying to recruit new members than I have. I knew this when I became treasurer, too, and I told everyone that I was no salesman, and would like there to be a separate Membership Chair to be the point-person on getting new members. The Board agreed that that would be a good idea, but so far that hasn't worked out, and the need for action has increased with our costs. Let's put this on the agenda for the next board meeting, shall we? And someone should try to summarize the ideas in this item. (If no one beats me to it, I will make a summary next time I'm on.)
Has anybody considered whether to take me up on my idea?
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I offered to donate a T-shirt and shipping costs for a drawing to be held amongst all the folks who join as members for at least one year during the months of May and June in honour of Grexes birthday --to have the T in time to wear to the b'day bash.
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Sounds fine to me too.
Ok, where's the motd file? I'll announce it there.
In /etc
My prediction is that with the terrific new hardware/software we should see a dramatic *increase* in members over the next few months even without doing active recruiting. I hope.
Yeah -- but this is also a good time for outreach to those folks who might not otherwise consider how this free service is paid for.
You're right, Misti.
So, we're going to let Misti run with her idea, and see if it does any good before discussing anything else?
We discussed quite a few ideas at the last board meeting (I read a summary of this item), and the consensus was that the one we want to try first is sending mail to users who are not members on their 3-month, 6-month, 9-month, etc. anniversaries, explaining what Grex is about and asking them to consider supporting us. Here's what needs to be done to get that going (as I understand it): 1. Someone needs to get MSQL to run on Grex. 2. Someone needs to teach Newuser (and Web Newuser) to put data about newusers in an MSQL database. 3. Someone needs to write a program to read the database and identify those users who passed one of the 3-month anniversaries since the last time the program was run, and send them mail if they are not members already. 4. We need to decide on the text of the message to send. Valerie volunteered to do steps 1 and 2, and Jan volunteered to do step 3. When I get back to town, I may be able to help with some of that too. As for step 4, someone should write a draft for the message and post it here in coop, for people to critique. If no one does that before I get back, I'll give it a shot.
Ahh... the things one misses from not being in AA, eh?
Well, it was in the minutes of the board meeting, too.
You have several choices: