[Date Prev][Date Next] [Chronological] [Thread] [Top]

Re:Re: (erielack) My $.02 worth concerning the recent ELHS

Kevin and anyone else interested:

At .333, you're still a pretty good batter but as a team, you're miserable. As a coach, you're probably in some other line of work; as a corporation, you're history

Apparently, this has been obvious for a while, with no solution forthcoming.  Now, here's a thought:

A statement, 50 words or fewer, from every member as to what it will take to keep him/her/them.  Anything from "no change" to "restore the 1933 Erie Limited behind steam!"  I am willing to receive and tabulate the results by email.  I won't store them; I'm not that crazy!.

There it is.  Something for senters and dissenters.  No reply will be counted as "no change."  I will take 1100 as a base membership number.

So far, it's 1100 to 0 for no change, but it's still a little early to tell for sure.

Messages longer than 50 words will be deleted without tabulation.

On a lighter note, I wonder how many members ever equated the membership ID with a specific locomotive?  How many could do it in steam and diesel?  I presume #16 was a very old 0-6-0, maybe a B-3?

That last bit will serve as a test to see if anybody reads this culm.

Randy Brown, ELHS#16
- --------------------------------------------------------------
The highest number that I've seen appended to a posters name on this email list is ELHS #3476. So its gotta be over 3500 by now, figuring not everyone who joins ELHS is a member of this list.

An educated guess, based on the price of dues calculated against financial deposits recorded, says that the ELHS probably has somewhere between 900 and 1100 dues-paying members.  The unknown
X-factor is how much the group makes in donations or sales of misc products.

At best, the group is retaining only one in three members it recruits.

As a historical society, one in three membership retention has to be really bad.  Comparitively, as a "publishing company" whose only real "product" is a magazine subscription, one in three subscriber retention probably isn't outside the bounds of acceptability.

Any re-use of membership numbers would work to mask (hide) the retention problem from appearing as serious as it really is.

I'd be curious to know how this one-in-three compares to societies operating with elected boards, and which offer their membership additional 'features' beyond just a magazine subscription (like on-line access to paper archives, or participation in equipment restoration projects).

------------------------------