Any thoughts on going fully electronic and saving costs on printing, postage and ad hoc mailing issues?
Maybe an ‘opt out’ option for those who would prefer the instant electronic version vs. paper copy.
Likely a wildly unpopular opinion. More and more companies are thinking of their ESG responsibilities.
As a club, we have two classifications of assets: tangible and intangible. The intangible assets are our members. The tangible assets are our forum (and its content); our magazine (and its content); our technical manual (integral to the forum), and our accounts (PayPal and Bank) which hold our funds in US dollars.
We protect out accounts by holding them in secure places: banks and PayPal, where only those so authorized have access, and only legitimate approved expenditures are made.
We protect our forum by requiring membership for many things. We also have a number of "fortifications" to prevent hacking, etc. in place.
We protect our technical manual by requiring full paid membership for access.
We protect our magazine by printing it on paper and distributing it only to full members.
While it may be a "green" thing (for lack of a better word) to do by NOT distributing the magazine on paper, once we distribute it on PDF, we no longer have
any control over it. One PDF emailed to one person can quickly work its way to hundreds or thousands of copies going all around the world to people
who have not paid for the privilege of reading it or receiving it. The protection is lost and gone.
There is no way to control access to a PDF in any meaningful way. The best was to control this is by printing it ONLY on paper.
Further to this, IF we were to change the magazine from paper to electronic format, and distribute it by email, (we have no plans to do so)
we would still have the same problem we have right this moment, just with a twist. While the number of members falling into this category is few, they make it very challenging for those board members serving them; these few members don't go to the forums, they don't
get their emails, they don't
read their emails, they provide email addresses they don't use, and they don't keep their addresses (physical and electronic) up to date. The challenges we face are caused by any one or more of those things. All it takes is one to throw a wrench in the works.
The mail problem with PW #30 had nothing to do with the members. It was a printer or postal problem for which we will probably not know the answer why more than 300 copies were not delivered around the world. Nonetheless, with little regard for cost, we decided as a board to reprint for those members who didn't receive #30. We endeavored, with a generous timeline, to collect information on who did not get it. At the end of the period (plus a few days allowance for stragglers), we ordered a secondary print run. We had them all mailed out, and they all went out on April 27th.
Meanwhile, even after the process was seeming finished on our end, more and more requests for #30 kept coming. Problem was, we quickly exhausted them. There are no more copies.
So, in the electronic world, regardless of how we chose to make it available, if the past is indicative of the future, we'd have a few members unable to download, unable to get the email, unable to open it, or the same reasons why they never got the notices about the PW #30 issue. We're still taking time to deal with it, though the last copies of #30 were hand processed by us yesterday and will be in today's mail.