Re: [AISdiscuss] A March Message

[ZEBRAIRIS1@aol.com]

Hi all,

    I see that staying off-line for a few days when the President is going to 
put out her monthly letter, can produce a ton of reading material.  Trust the 
"Boss" to chuck the proverbial "cat" amongst us "pigeons" once again.  This 
time we get to rant and rave about E-memberships.  Once again we take a simple 
business proposition that needs a business case to define its pros and cons; 
costs and revenue; and advantages and disadvantages and turn it into a 
free-for-all.

    Although the term E-memberships conveys the concept of state of the art 
competitiveness and revenues, the hard reality is it will take a lot of work 
and maybe money to build a website that people would actually pay to use.  
First, what does the AIS have to sell? - Information and pictures!  So what kind of 
information do we have? -administrative, iris culture, current and historic.  
Administrative information is given away free to enhance the functioning of 
the AIS and to attract new members. (No money there!) Again, the AIS provides 
free information on the growing of irises to help its members. Can't charge for 
this information! (No money here!).

    Then there is current information and that would primarily be an 
electronic copy of the bulletin.  Now at least this has some possibility as was 
mentioned by many folks and especially Terry.  A site that has the current AIS 
bulletin and maybe the last two-year's bulletins may be of some interest especially 
to foreign members as Terry points out.  But is this likely to increase 
membership revenues to AIS?  I doubt it, with the exception of new foreign members, 
because the AIS will just be substituting current or future "regular" 
memberships for E-memberships.  It may reduce costs to the AIS by eliminating the 
printed bulletins, but there will be costs of setting up the site.

    Finally there is the HUGH (to quote Gerry) quantity of historic 
information available.  This would be equivalent to building an electronic AIS library 
and while I think that creating an electronic library is a worthwhile effort, 
how many people are going to be willing to pay to use it?  Or how much will 
they pay to use it?  I know that when I go into a website I just copy all the 
information I want and then don't need to return to it.

    An enhanced website and e-memberships are probably vital to the continued 
health of the AIS, but it will take a lot of volunteer work to keep it from 
costing more money than its going to bring in.

    It must be spring because the irises are starting to grow and it's cold, 
windy, and wet!

All the best, Brad K

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To sign-off this list, send email to the AIS Secretary
aissecjill@earthlink.net.