Fwd: PDF magazines
Fwd: PDF magazines
- Subject: Fwd: PDF magazines
- From: Jim Foster <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2004 20:44:42 -0500
Oops!! Sent this the first time from an unsubscribed email address.
Begin forwarded message:
From: Jim Foster <email@hidden>
Date: March 30, 2004 8:31:10 PM EST
To: Peter Carter <email@hidden>
Cc: email@hidden
Subject: Re: PDF magazines
On 30-Mar-04, at 4:44 PM, Peter Carter wrote:
Some members were unhappy about no longer having paper in their
hands, others got themselves lost trying to download it from the
club's web site, but they now seem to have the idea.
Our MUG experienced similar dramatic cost reductions. We DID at the
outset announce to all members that we were doing this for cost
reduction reasons but that we were prepared to keep sending paper
issues to people if they specifically requested it or if we had no
email address on record for them. This led to only about six mailed
copies in a club of over 50 members.
But, the thing we didn't do for several years, which I wish we had had
the ability to do right away, was to start tracking exactly how many
times our PDF newsletter was being downloaded from our web site. Of
course, we are not able to tell which person downloaded an issue, but
once we found out how to access and tabulate the log files from the
server, we confirmed our worst fears that only a small minority of the
club members were actually taking the time to download the PDF file
between the date it was uploaded and the date of the next member
meeting after the uploading. We in turn feel that this is one of the
reasons why our meeting attendance has dropped, i.e. that some people
had trained themselves to view the receipt of the paper newsletter in
the mail as an indication that a meeting was imminent.
What to do about all this is not simple. We certainly cannot go back
to snail mailing our newsletter, primarily because it has more than
doubled in size since we went to electronic distribution and now
incorporates a lot of colour, all of which would increase costs
dramatically if we tried to put paper copies into members' hands. One
thing we CAN do at meetings is reinforce our offer to mail it out to
specific people who want it that way .. experience having showed that
we won't get a lot of requests. Another thing we can do at meetings is
to simply demonstrate the process for downloading each month's issue.
A third thing we have done, aimed at reminding people about upcoming
meetings but not necessarily getting them to download our newsletter,
is we have started a six month pilot program to mail out meeting
reminder postcards to all members, each one reminding members about
the next TWO regular meetings. This is a costly program, as costly as
the old practice of mailing a newsletter, but at least it does not
involv stuffing envelops or printing and affixing labels. We will
track our meeting attendance by member name over the six months and
hopefully see an increase in attendance.
Jim Foster
President
Macintosh Users East [MaUsE]
http://www.mause.ca
_______________________________________________
augd mailing list | email@hidden
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives:
http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/augd
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.