President's Report

I'm very interested in what you think.

This new style of E-Newsletter has a few advantages the old .pdf style did not.

On the production side:
The old style needed someone in particular to gather all the articles and information. Then that person needed to adjust the font styles and sizes to fit into the boxes each article needed to. Then add colors, photographs, pictures, and links. This portion was done in M/S Publisher and once the layout was complete, the file needed to be converted to Adobe Acrobat. It was also important that the version of Acrobat was held low enough to match the versions of the readers.
Finally, the Acrobat file (.pdf) was uploaded to the server. The monthly email went out to all paid members, pointing them to the .pdf to download.

There's a good deal of time and effort to do this. But that's not why we are switching.
The process detailed above requires 3 expensive and detailed programs to do correctly.

In everything we as a Board of Directors consider, we look at the long term consequences.
One persons ability to create or produce something of value to the club is great, but what happens when that person can no longer continue? It does no good to have to be constantly re-inventing the wheel.

The idea of "Perpetuity" relates to finances but also to most anything we do is this club.
If we can create something of value, and make it so that at anytime anyone else can step in and continue on, then that is indeed a thing of value.

On the member's side:
I have talked to many members about the E-newsletter.
While the information stream was generally thought of as great, the delivery was the most criticized. Having to download a file to read it is counter productive.

Assuming the reader has the correct software, they would have to access their email first, then click on the correct link to download the file. Once the file was downloaded, it could then finally be read.

When we send out the mass email announcing the E-Newsletter we can track how many open the email, how many follow a link, and how many download the file.
Using last month's mailer as an example, we had current membership totaling 621.

Of those:

• Only 533 had an email address
  
• 19 of those bounced for one reason or another
• 341 were opened and read
• 14 clicked on the links to the Events Calendar
• 6 clicked on the link to the 912bbs.org (perhaps discovering it for the first time)
• 1 person clicked on the link to 912Registry.org (first time again?)
• 15 members clicked to renew their membership
• 17 needed to download Acrobat from the link
• and ONLY 246 Members downloaded the E-Newsletter

That means ultimately we are connecting with only 40% of our membership!
That's not good enough.

This new web based E-Newsletter should change all that.
To read it you need only a web browser.
No software, no downloads, simple as can be.

At the same time it also offers the reader items that we didn't have before.

Recent Posts
Click on an item in the "Recent Posts" and you'll be taken to the head of that article.
Only that article will be displayed.
If you would like to print just one article, this is the easy way to do it.

Links
Easy Links for the Calendar, Renewal, Rendezvous, and the Forum.

Archives
Click on a prior month or year and read what was produced in the past.
This being the first month there is no prior month.

Home
No matter where you are, if ever you want to get back to "home" on the E-News, just click on the banner at the top that looks like this:








Labels
As an added bonus we have labels!
The label function works like this:
Say you remember reading about something in Competition in the past but cannot remember which month that was. Instead of going back and reading each month's entire E-newsletter, just click on the label at the bottom of the article. The website will automatically compile each and every "Competition" article every produced in chronological order!
Now just scan thru and find what you were looking for!
How cool is that!

Speaking of cool...
I am very excited to introduce our latest venture.

THE SHIRT OF THE MONTH!

Scroll down to the Gear Report and see the first in a monthly installment of exciting and edgy 912 designs!

That's all for this month.
Remember, I'd really like to hear what you think.
Oh, and you can even leave a comment here below!
Yet even more E-news coolness.


Mike Mueller – President