Haskell,
You covered a lot of ground there. I will take a stab at addressing the big points.
Presentations: A schedule can be changed, no problem. What we have had since I have been a member is that nobody planned even thirty days in advance. That puts a lot of pressure on the Club volunteers that run the administrative stuff. LOL As you said, none of us wants to make it a job, and having something on “fire and forget”, something as simple as making out a presentation schedule; that ensures that we at least have a placeholder. If someone comes up with a terrific idea for a presentation that the topic or current events suggest that we run it then, as a second presentation or swap the new one in and move the other to a later date; nobody is suggesting otherwise. To me that is a beautiful plan.
Location: If we had chatted about it I could have saved you the call to Tuttle. We were not disinvited from the PD, we left because the benches were uncomfortable, support for using a projector for presentations was inconsistent as it worked sometimes and didn’t others and it just wasn’t a warm and inviting environment. That isn’t what courtrooms are designed for… Admittedly, there were fewer potential distractions, but we are pretty consistently having 50-100% more people at High Cotton than we had at the PD. We went from the PD to Kelly’s church. That place was super, but when his cancer was diagnosed he sold the building and we moved to another church. The acoustics were really, really, bad there. We subsequently secured the back room at High Cotton. It does cost us $50, but we have generally only received positive feedback since moving there. The first month we had the meeting at HC a hand full of people showed up at 10am and ordered breakfast while the meeting was being conducted. That was a distraction and so we started emphasizing that if people wanted breakfast to be there at 0900 for breakfast so that we could cut down on the distractions. That was an improvement and I think everyone involved agrees that is how we should conduct business – No meal service during the meeting. As for complaints about High Cotton, we have received lots of positive comments and no complaints. We can sure poll it if you want.
Readers (web viewers): Charles has a couple of times stated as fact, completely devoid of factual evidence, that we didn’t have hardly anyone going to the Club website and expressing disappointment at the few number of forum participants. I had to point him to some facts that rebutted his statement and tried to inform him on forum participation.
Fact: Our website gets about 500 hits a week. We are getting a lot of views. The things we are doing with the site are adding value and growing our participation. That growing participation is one of the sales points of our Business Development Plan, which you will be getting a full briefing on at the board of directors meeting tomorrow.
Fact: Lurkers versus Participants – From Topic: Club Meeting 11/19/2022 @ High Cotton last fall:
Questions? Comments? Critique? This is your Club and your forum, please let us know your thoughts. A common misperception is that a lack of forum posts means a lack of interest and a lack of participants. I have been a forum moderator and/or admin on sites with many tens of thousands of members. We used to informally look at the percentage of “lurkers” versus active participants. In all cases lurkers far and away outnumbered the participants. Here is a study if you are interested:
The 90-9-1 Rule for Participation Inequality in Social Media and Online Communities
Summary: In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.
So, would I love to get a lot of feedback on every post that people make? Absolutely. Do I think with ~40 members, typically 20 at a Club meeting and with people as busy as they are, our forums should be a hub of activity like perhaps FaceBook or some other social media sites? No. And if that study linked to above is accurate then we are lucky to have four members contribute a little! So, if you read something you like, please validate the poster by hitting reply and giving them a “Yay!” or something, even if you don’t want to write a treatise.
To be clear, you can save the replies and follow up for other posts. If you got this far reading this post, thanks! Mission accomplished.
73
Phillip
Haskell, we have a lot of statistics, how many people go to the site, how many people go to the forums, how many people open our email and how quickly they do it (~170 on email list, 48 active members (up year-over-year), email opens average 15-20 within 2-4 hours of send (depending on time of day) and overall better than 60% open within three days), but at this point we have no idea how many people read a particular forum post. Our website and forum are primitive by some measures, but if you look around at other ham radio clubs it is (not just my opinion) head and shoulders better than most. It is a WordPress site, which like Firefox is a free to use tool that can be upgraded and enhanced through use of plugins and hard coding. All of that takes time and effort and in some cases money. And right now only three people (Rick Leonhardt, Leo and me) have the aptitude to do anything as far as development. Leo has a full-time job and many other interests that limit his participation and Rick and I are peddling as fast as we can. LOL The whole experience, from website to membership growth and participation and our presentations have evolved a lot in the last five years. I see what I believe are positive trends and anything that is less than perfect is the result of growing pains and generational change. I have been working on building a historical perspective and as yet unpublished website presence on the history of the Club. Like what you have been doing in your office, a Club meeting in years gone by was one where 5-10 people met in the living room at someone’s home and they rotated amongst homes. They had repeater gear up at someone’s home and it was not insured. Today we have a much larger presence overall. A larger audience, not just a larger membership, but an overall larger audience and we have a lot invested, tens of thousand of dollars, in now insured infrastructure. Some might wistfully desire that it was more like it was in past decades, more of a small social get together to show and tell about radio gear, but surely nobody is surprised that the Club has needed to evolve to keep up with societal and equipment changes and how we deliver what we do in service to the community.
Haskell, thanks for the feedback/observations/questions. I look forward to your burgeoning participation. For that matter, your continued participation too Charles. We bump heads on occasion, but I totally respect you and what you have done and continue to do for the Club. If anyone else has a comment or question, please feel free.
Phillip