Another Stamp Society Bites The Dust

Greatest response ever to, "times are changing"...

Well, "Come gather round people wherever you roam/And admit that the waters around you haven't grown/And accept it that soon you'll still be dry" doesn't have the same ring.

The internet has made everything about running a small specialty club easier than ever.

Compare getting people to mail-in a check, and handling those checks, as opposed to Life With PayPal.

Compare club meetings that can be attended by a few percent of the members with 24/7 online forums.

Compare (as GeoffHa points-out) everything about publishing a newsletter/journal, especially handling imagery.

This should be The Golden Age of specialty clubs; I suspect that they may be drowning in the ocean of free (relevant) content, suffering from the expectation that everything information-based should be 'free' (advertising-supported) and, of course, That Demographic Issue.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey (who suggested in the past that SCF offer free sub-forums to clubs, with the proviso that we can all read that traffic, to the benefit of all)

The answer to the question "Why did that nonprofit hobby society fail?" always is another question, "What did it do to market itself to new members, how often and how extensively?" Has anyone ever seen an ad for SOC anywhere or noticed its members posting here or elsewhere online? The most difficult part of running a club or society is that membership promotion must be constant and it is exhausting. Many a club officer has quit when the administrative burden of promoting the club starts to occupy more time than actually enjoying the club's substantive activities.

Changing tastes also are at fault. Many feel that the Olympics were forever devalued when they switched to the two year alternating format, and became packaged as a major TV entertainment event to "sell". Doping scandals and the introduction of niche sports seeking to "find a new audience" have not help. Meanwhile the "wallpaper" postal agencies pump out huge volumes of philatelic material that no one can keep up with. It's no surprise that Olympic collecting has lost its allure.

Nah... that seems to me the antithesis.
But often poetry leaves room for reader interpretation. I guess...

Getting people to fill leadership roles in clubs/societies these days is a huge problem. Everyone wants to sit back and be served. How many lurk here and rarely of ever post?

Maybe the issue is not so much with participation (in the end people still join, many pay their dues etc), but long term commitment required by 'leading' roles. So possibly a more proper question would be how to make leading roles more 'temporary'.

And if that doesn't help, one could always suggest hiring outside (professional) help for those tasks that nobody wants to take care. Out there are professional editors, accountants etc. that are more than willing to do even small jobs as long as they get paid properly by the hour. It might nudge the society fees up a by few bucks a month, but that is the price of 'sit back and be served'.

-k-

But as someone else said, formatting a journal is far less the problem than getting the material, plus an outside editor will have little clue whether submitted material is garbage or not.

And in many publications the problem is just the opposite (there is too much content being offered). Which of course begs the essential question - why has it become reversed for (some) philatelic publications?

Getting an editor in such situation is bit like throwing band master on the stage without the band. It can go on (and be succesfull) for some time, but eventually it will crash & burn (in more ways than one).





Editor is nothing more than band leader - he/she does not need to know how to change strings to a violin, but he/she should know where to find a person to do the job... So a smart philatelic editor would go to specialized collector of that area, and asks him/her to do an peer review/opinion for the content (and possibly even publish that as well).

So all in all... Trying to discover an editor (or whatever) that does-it-all-knows-it-all is like chasing an unicorn. It doesn't exist (and nobody wants to become that unicorn).

Just my 5 cents of worth,
-k-

In the end, there is likely a home somewhere on the Internet if there was continuing interest. Some philatelic forums produce newsletters and would welcome their material. You see one man activities like Big Blue blog.

Many established groups seem to NOT want members to interact on the Internet. Some fail to realize all those new to collecting have never read all the prior material written. It is trapped in publications that cannot be read by most.

I am certainly more at ease producing my own Blog than I am with membership of clubs and societies. There is a "group" think within all of these that do not appeal to me.
There are two types of "club"...the local based on geographical area and the multi-national which is based in different countries with a single collecting interest and connected by eg a quarterly newsletter.
Increasingly I think that the future of local clubs is in developing connexions with other collecting interests (eg Coins) and developing from there.
Id be more sceptical about the future of "international clubs" as anything they do can be done better online.

The issue here is affordability.

I edited and wrote for newspapers and magazines for more than 20 years. I worked in digital marketing. I have skills to help some of these clubs. However, my rates for my occasional freelance work would likely preclude many clubs from hiring me. Plan issues, chase down stories, edit, layout and design, secure art and photography, getting approvals (I assume) from the board or some board designee), possibly taking care of printing and distribution, or online distribution if digital only. These things take TIME even for a relatively small publication. And the likelihood is that many of the articles will have to be written by the editor and/or heavily edited. Then who takes care of ad sales/design, etc.?

There's a model I've toyed with, but I have trouble getting the price point down to a level I think a smallish society would pay.

I have offered countless times to assist with clubs, publications, and other philatelic groups websites (for free). My experience is not good. A number of them are under control of others who do not want to release that control even through their websites are horrible and rarely updated. I have heard all kinds of lame excuses like "my brother-in-law does our website". At other times I build and develop a new website for a group in a few days but then wait months and months for them to react and do anything. It is clear to me that some of these groups are used to working at a pace which drags out development for months. I am astounded at the glacial pace which has occurred and can see no reason for it other than this is just what they do.

And the last issue is 'change'. Many of these organizations have traditionally limited access to ALL information; they have held access back and dangled it like a carrot on a stick to entice membership. They are scared to death to develop a website with free content, they are clueless on how to build website traffic, they have no idea how to convert website traffic into money. These organizations are easy to spot, they are the websites which you only need to go to once every 3 months since the content really never changes. They are the sites which are basically only 'a web presence'. Do these groups really think that this entices people to join?

It certainly is no surprise to me that some of them do not survive. But I do not think that the issue is a lack of help or funding; it is a fear of change and this is why they refuse to give up control. It is not rocket science, the saying is true... 'Lead, Follow, or get the hell out of the way'.
Don

This is so true. I'm a member of groups that use a variety of ancient systems -- Yahoo groups, bulletin boards, etc. On at least a half-dozen occasions, I've offered or built demo phpBB forums for them that would give them a top-notch discussion forum with features they didn't previously have (photos, attachments, etc.). And I would host them for free on my server.

On all but one of the occasions, they never even visited to see the demo site. On the one occasion they did, they complained that it couldn't replicate one ancient feature that no-one had used on the existing site for over 5 years. In the end, I realized it was entirely an issue of control -- even though I made no demands for payment or any level of control other than admin rights as the site admin, and I've run a commercial, ad-free stamp website for over a decade at no benefit to myself.

Just another demonstration of why the hobby is shorting itself in the digital age.