The Board of Directors
SCA Inc.
c/o Elizabeth Johnson
Chairman of the Finance Committee
7875 Wintercress Lane
Springfield, VA 22152
Dear Sirs:
I am writing in response to the request for comments in the Fall 1991 T.I. My answers to your numbered questions are.
1. I prefer unbundling the membership structure. One advantage of this is that it avoids wasting money by sending publications to people who do not want them--either because they are not interested or because they have access to someone else's copy. A second advantage is that, by observing changes in subscription rates for the various publications, the board and the steward will get some information on how good the publications are. If, in most kingdoms, 50% of the membership subscribes to the newsletter, then a kingdom where the rate is only 30% may well be doing something wrong--and a kingdom chronicler who manages a rate of 70% is clearly doing something right.
2. I see no good reason to adopt any of the additional options proposed.
3. The proposed rates do not seem reasonable. My most serious reservation with regard to your proposed structure is the size of the charge for a bare membership. According to figures published earlier, insurance costs less than two dollars per member. Publications, under this proposal, are funded separately. So it looks as though you are proposing to spend ten dollars per member--well over two hundred thousand dollars a year--on administration. While I believe that you can spend that much, I find it hard to believe that there is any need to.
In discussions of administrative costs, mailing and phone expenses are often mentioned. Ten dollars per member means that you can send each member two first class letters a month and still have some money left over. My guess is that not one member in twenty, in the average year, actually corresponds with the corporate organization, so I do not see how postage (or phone) expenses can use up any significant fraction of what you propose to charge.
Keeping track of membership surely cannot cost any sizable fraction of ten dollars per member per year--even if you have to do it entirely with hired labor. Traditionally, the Society has had very few paid employees, and they have been paid at a salary that reflects a compromise between the fact that most of the Society's activity is provided by volunteer labor and the practical difficulty of surviving if all of your time is being spent on an unpaid job. Assuming that you intend to continue that policy--and I have not seen any discussion of the possibility of switching to a sizable staff of well paid professionals--you should be able to cover salaries for something like two or three dollars per member per year. I therefore propose one substantial modification in the unbundled version of your proposal--the reduction of the price for a bare membership to about six dollars.
I assume that that proposal will be rejected--presumably you did your calculations on the basis of money currently being spent, and so have good evidence that the reduction would result in the Corporation taking in less than it now spends. I therefore offer an alternative proposal. You should generate figures on where the money is going that are good enough to let you answer the question I have posed--how we can require an expenditure for bare administration of more than ten dollars per member. The answer should be useful to you as well as interesting to me and other members. It cannot be deduced from the figures so far published in T.I.
4. Yes. While I do not think T.I. is as good as it ought to be (see below), it is good enough to be worth your proposed price to me. The same is true for the newsletters. On the other hand, I am not a very typical member, both because I am a well paid professional and because I have been very heavily involved in the Society.
5. In my opinion, there are two things wrong with T.I. The first is that the quality of articles is very uneven. In cooking, which is one of the fields I know something about, I would guess that at least half of the articles published over the past ten years have contained information that was either false or misleading--typically implying that dishes were period when they were not. One part of the solution, which I believe the current editor is trying to implement, is a better system for getting articles checked by competent readers--either referees or specialized assistant editors. The second part is to make an effort to get more good articles. One possibility might be to try to get the kingdoms involved--perhaps by having some issues sponsored by particular kingdoms. They would then have an incentive to beat the bushes looking for good local people to write things. That might or might not work.
The second problem with T.I., and even more with our Kingdom newsletter (and probably others), is that it is tending to become more and more a house organ for the central organization rather than a source of information for the membership. The following comments are lifted from a letter I sent to His Majesty of the Middle on the subject.
With regard to the Pale, my concern is that it is developing into a house organ for the Kingdom's central organization (royalty and Kingdom officers) and away from a publication intended to serve the membership and provide them event information. It looks as though each of the officers (and each royal couple) has a page to fill, with more available if necessary. The result is to print a considerable amount of inessential information--thank you's, the Chatelaine's description of how a group uses colored paper butterflies to make itself known to mundanes, etc. This would be all right if space were not a problem--but it is happening at the same time that groups have been cut to half a page once for event announcements, with the result that maps are largely crowded out save for those groups prepared to pay the (newly increased) advertising charges. It is happening long after the point at which articles have been essentially crowded out of the Pale, save for the Arts and Sciences issue.
This seems to me to reflect the opposite of the correct priorities. Officers who wish to communicate with their subordinates should do so by mail, not by taking up space in a publication with information relevant to only a tiny fraction of the readers. Royalty should make proclamations when they have something important to say, but not expect to routinely use a page or two per couple per issue. General discussions by officers should be held to about the same standards as articles by other people--the objective should be to publish whatever is of most use and interest to the readers, not to provide officers with a free soapbox. Following those policies would, I think, permit us to go back to a total of a page per event announcement, and perhaps even to include an occasional article.
The following numbers summarize the situation. I counted pages in three issues of the Pale that were lying around, classifying them as Routine Information (Calender, regnum, waivers, etc.), Central Information (things by the royalty or kingdom officers), and Middle Kingdom event announcements. I did not include in any category Corporate announcements. The totals were as follows:
Issue Routine Information Central Information M. K. Event Announcements
July 13 14 8
May-June 10 7.5 9 (+4 pages for InterKingdom University)
December 10 7 7 (+3 pages for Estrella & Ice Dragon)
The equivalent problem in T.I. is somewhat less, in part because the Steward frequently has something to say and says it well; many of her essays would be worth printing even if she were not Steward. There is no reason to believe the same will be true of her sucessor. Nor is it true, in my judgement, of all of the other Corporate officers.
Of course, getting information from officers to members is one legitimate use of both T.I. and the newsletters. But there is a large difference between a one sentence notice ("as of September 1st, no fighter who does not have an authorization card will be permitted to fight") and a one page essay. The former, if important, should go in automatically. The latter should go in only if it is better than the best material that could have gone in instead.
6. Branch population counts should be based on members. One disadvantage to basing the count on subscriptions is that people who are trying to increase the count for their group then have an incentive to subscribe to things they do not actually want to read. One of the advantages of unbundling is that members then only subscribe to T.I. or the newsletters if they actually want them.
Also, on a related topic, the number of members required for a local branch should not increase with the total size of the Society. The relevant issue for a new group is how many people it takes to make it viable, not how large a fraction of the Society it is.
So far as baronies are concerned, my inclination would be to move to a system of local option. Kingdoms that want to avoid small baronies can raise the required size; kingdoms that like them can keep the present requirement.
7. No. The Society should require membership for a narrower range of activities. In particular, it should not require membership for local officers who are not official representatives of the Society. Our present policy amounts to telling people that we will only accept donations of labor if they are accompanied by donations of cash, which is a rather odd way for an organization run mostly on volunteer labor to do things. I have discussed this issue at much greater length before, and will therefore not do so here.
I note, by the way, that there is a certain bias in the way this question was put, since it assumes that we should only consider moving in one direction.
Sincerely Yours
David Friedman (Cariadoc)
4919 S. Dorchester
Chicago, IL 60615
cc: Cliveden Chew Haas
P.O. Box 360743
Milpitas, CA 95036-0743