Re: AUGD: Re: Membership levels?
Re: AUGD: Re: Membership levels?
- Subject: Re: AUGD: Re: Membership levels?
- From: barbpassman <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 1 Jan 2007 08:52:22 -0600
We are one price for all with the one exception that we offer a
discount to the second (or more) persons at the same address.
Formerly, we had a tiered membership but we were not in position to
truly monitor; we offered a senior citizen discount and a student
discount. Over time we noted that most of the true seniors were the
ones most able to afford our modest membership fee. We also had no
way of strictly checking and some persons took ad advantage which led
to other members' complaints that persons were showing us outdated
student IDS or dissembling about their status as full time students.
So, we found it easier to drop the categories rather than become
validity police.
Like many of you, we have experienced serious drop in our membership
over the years. For the past several years we have had a small stable
group of loyal members who pay dues. These are folks who come to most
meetings, enjoy the camaraderie with each other and who truly are
devoted to the Mac.
We have others who attend now and again and, as we meet in an Apple
Store,using its theater, some folks just attend a meeting because
they are in the store. We generally have about 40 attendees ,
sometimes more if the speaker or topic is particularly timely.
We do have a chat list which has considerable number of subscribers,
a good number are folks who live too distant to come to our meetings,
some are folks who retired out of state but wish to stay involved.
We don't charge for the list membership as it provides energy to the
group . And case in point, one gentleman, who manages this listserv
or chat group is not able to come to many meetings anymore yet is
active and contributes by being a presence on the listserv.
So, our income is not that high but our expenses also are low.
Yes, as many of you recall for your groups, I remember the heyday
when our MUG had nearly 400 paid members!.When meetings brought over
one hundred attendees and we scurried to find chairs for all.When we
had robust sales of floppy disks with shareware compilations which
many could not obtain other than through our disks. Those were the
days of slow dial up communications and Bulletin Boards with their
command line interfaces which we thought were so cool :)
Yup, like you, we were bigger but the Internet has changed so much
for all of us, in good and bad ways.
We are much smaller but have fun at at our meetings, enjoy the Mac
and each other's company - all of which is real value. And we
continue,albeit with realistic goals, to look for ways in which we
can add value to Mac users' computing experience so that we may grow.
That is the challenge we all face.
Happy New Year to all.
May 2007 be a happy ,healthy and successful year for you personally,
your MUG members and lets hope Apple and our Mac platform continue
to flourish!!
Sincerely
Barbara Passman
Director
The Rest of Us,
Chicago's Macintosh User Group
At 4:46 PM -0800 12/28/06, Richard Weiss wrote:
We are free but we have tiered membership. If you don't want to come
to the Q&A session, well it's 1/2 off. And we offer a double your
money back if not completely satisfied. More to the point;
These days its tough to (1) get members at all, (2) get members to
come to meetings, (3) be active in the club, (4) renew their
membership after a year or two.
Our list has ~160 members yet last week Fujitsu gave away a $400
machine and we had 20 souls there. It's a real WTF situation. best,
Rich Weiss
Ambassador
http://ebmug.org
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