An e-mail arrived late last night...9.03pm to be precise.
The club's newsletter was attached...how very nice.
I opened the attachment...scanned through it in a couple of seconds, closed it and went off to bed.
By this morning the e-mail was buried below 15 other E-mails that turned up during the night...which means in my MS Outlook set-up it's off the front page.
What are the chances I'll print it out??? Fairly small given the volume of stuff that needs printing and the constant frustration at the amount of paper we use...besides mentally I'll assume I can always go back and find the E-mail (how often have you tried to do that?)...
So what are the chances I'll go back and read the bits I missed or update my calender from the roster???
What are the chances anybody else in my household will read it???? Essentially from now on no-one else in this household will have any idea what's happening at the local club...and neither will any visitors who had in the past picked up a copy off the coffee table.
I understand that the club wishes to reduce it's costs...although by shifting the cost to the members in a global sense doesn't achieve much....
If we are going to put the Newsletter on the club website then we may as well just send out an E-mail with the link embedded and be done with it...
In may ways the website could be the solution...just keep up-dating it with stuff, rosters, photos, reports etc and drive members and the public to it...we would, of course, need to do away with the silly password protection on most of the content.
But I go back to the central question...how do we wish to communicate with members, how much of the newsletter printing was actually a promotional activity?? Of all the adverts, posters, newspaper articles and brochures it's possible the little old newsletter was the best printed promotional activity we ever did...but without a marketing plan we'll never know...
I would humbly suggest (or even arrogantly if it helps) that if the enormous cost savings from not printing and posting the newsletter were applied to the website we might recover some lost ground...
And yes, I'm being resistant to change...it's because I'm older than 30...which the vast majority of the club membership also happen to be...
We have similar issues at Piako, we used to have a newsletter, but now just the email newsletter. The advantage of the printed newsletter was there is a deadline for people to write reports. Now it's just me doing news as I can. Need to work on that... also yes opening up the website as much as possible is good. The only thing passworded is the admin and the contact list.
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