Re: AUGD: Creating a budget for a MUG
Re: AUGD: Creating a budget for a MUG
- Subject: Re: AUGD: Creating a budget for a MUG
- From: email@hidden
- Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2008 07:55:11 EST
Hello Victoria
The PBMUG does charge an annual membership fee (dues) of $40. When the club started a long time ago we charged $10 a year. We raised it as the members approved doing more with our money.
We charge this to defray costs of the club. We serve coffee and a snack at meetings, mail notices of meetings, buy "door prizes" for meetings, provide a monthly CD, pay for a 'thank you' dinner to presenters after the meeting, pay for dues to national & regional computer user associations, etc. Its not a lot, but it adds up.
Before we found a place to meet for free, the place we were meeting charged $20 and hour for the room and $600 a year for a special 'slip and fall' liability insurance for "outside groups." The savings allowed us to use our treasury to purchase a new projector to connect to the club's Mac-mini computer. Now we can meet anywhere.
Any sales training program recommends that its not just the features of what you offer, but the benefits to these features that motivates people to pay for them. Check out Apple's "Switcher" page for a great example of this. And see 10 Reasons To Join, too.
Features answer the "what it is," but Benefits answer the "what's in it for you."
For example, features of your club could be:
- regular meetings, or
- a monthly newsletter, or
- member only Hardware and Software Discounts.
And the Benefit is:
- save money,
- usefulness,
- keeping up with the latest.
The promotion could look like, "As a dues paying member of the XXMUG there are serious cash consequences. All paid up members get special offers and exclusive discounts so you could save money on what you want."
We have found that the value added of paid membership more than exceeds the nominal amount of the membership fee.
Gary Kampel
Apple Ambassador
PBMUG.org
--
“Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?”
-- Robert Browning quotes
In a message dated 2/11/08 9:03:21 PM, email@hidden writes:
I'm the president/ambassador for the Des Moines MUG and we have no dues, no treasury and thus, a limit on what we can do or how we can do it...
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