Re: Email to MUG Members
Re: Email to MUG Members
- Subject: Re: Email to MUG Members
- From: Jerry King <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 17:40:12 -0400
- Thread-topic: Email to MUG Members
Title: Re: Email to MUG Members
Hi Jim and others who are copying
100% of our members have an e-mail address (Or a prior working e-mail address) We tell members that their path to / from the club is via e-mail whether they check e-mail daily OR once a year. In reality, I doubt that any member you care about doesn’t have e-mail.
Our biggest complaint from members is that they don’t want all the messages because we have become a chatty group.
They have 3 options: all messages; a daily digest or: “no e-mail” which means that they don’t get the messages BUT can go to the web site to review all past messages .
You have a “tough” decision to make. Do you chase after those who don’t track current technology or move on? We have challenged the “old” to create and run a SIG for their benefit. No one has stepped up to the challenge. I stopped losing sleep about these members. For example, we tried to create a SIG for pre-OS X but no one offered to participate. You, as a MUG leader can NOT cover ALL the OS / hardware / software applications that exist. Define what your MUG will do and tell your members the rules; stay current or go elsewhere
Jerry
On 10/18/05 5:02 PM, "Jim Foster" <email@hidden> wrote:
On 18-Oct-05, at 4:01 PM, Jerry King wrote:
> BUT more members are interacting. More members are willing to
> contribute to our Monthly meeting sessions as presenters because
> the 2 or 5 MUG experts are no longer the source of all information
> about Apple computers and its software.
Thanks for that, Jerry....
Yes, I perhaps should have mentioned that our MUG too has a
Discussion List pretty much as you describe. Ours is with topica.com.
As I understand things, one of the features of our Discussion List is
that I cannot add people myself. It has to be a situation where I
ALLOW people (members) to register, and there is a technique I can
use which makes it very easy for them to do so, but the bottom line
is that we do NOT currently have ALL of our paid-up members
registered on our Discussion List.
I think what is behind all this is that, when we polled our members a
few years ago to find out how many of them had Internet access and
email, we were rather surprised to find that it was well over 90%. We
had imagined that it might only be 70%. But at the high figure we
found, we decided to go into electronic communication in a big way,
including things like distributing the monthly newsletter primarily
as a pdf file and only snail mailing it out to people who really made
a point of asking for it that way.
Well, what we have found out is that there is a big difference
between HAVING Internet and Internet Email access and USING it. It
turns out that a number of our members don't own a computer but they
do have a free yahoo or other email account and just pick up their
emails when they are at the public library or some other place where
they can access a web-based email service but in many cases cannot
download anything. But many of these members may be weeks between
visits to the Library. We know that this is still an issue, because
we normally send out our meeting notices only by email but on those
occasional months where we supplement that with snail mailing a
postcard reminder, the attendance always shoots up noticeably.
So, that may explain why not all members register for the Discussion
List and it also I suppose means that even a direct email message
won't get out to everyone.
Nevertheless, the members who DO use the Discussion List to ask
questions, as well as those who try to post responses, all uniformly
like it a lot.
Of course, one thing I suppose I could do if I was a better delegator
would be to ask our Apple Ambassador to be the single Executive
responsible for ALL bulk emails to our MUG members. Then I could also
give him the monthly job of auditing the Mail list against the
membership database!!
Jim Foster
President
Macintosh Users East [MaUsE]
http://www.mause.ca
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