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Bob, Excellent information! I do think you are a little overly enthusiastic about the initial numbers, which I think would be closer to 10% of AIS membership, but as you pointed out, the potential is there to increase membership from the plant community and garner more iris enthusiasts! And as the 'younger' gardening generation continues to use the internet as their primary source for information, AIS needs to be available for them as THE primary source of iris information, not DG! I am not sure about the philanthropic gesture part of membership, especially with the economy continuing to be sluggish, but it remains a possibility. If we look at the Daylily Society, and other plant societies, and DG, find out what works, we could use the information to our advantage. Service needs to be in the forefront of anything we do. You've brought up some very good points. Cheryl Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:07:16 -0400 From: robertpries@embarqmail.com To: aisdiscuss@aisboard.org Subject: [AISdiscuss] Electronic potential Everyone is probably tired of me comparing The Iris Encyclopedia and E-membership to Daves Garden. But had a revelation today. I have been searching for a way to equate the results of the DG site and our potential. I noticed today that DG claims 182,005 different plant files. They list 18,000 Iris files. I believe this is a pretty good indicator of what activity on DG is Iris. That means if we multiplied their data by 10% we might have a pretty good estimate of the Iris societies potential. They have 532,473 members, we could anticipate 53,000 users of the Iris Encyclopedia. They have 273,128 images. The wiki already has 19,000 images for 20,000 cultivars. That means for just the pages we have already up we could easily expect another 8,000 images when the Iris Encyclopedia becomes visible on the AIS website. And since we will ultimately have about 80,000 cultivars we might easily expect 160,000+ images. DG has 6,501 subscribers at $20 a subscription and the only real benefit for them is being able to visit the site more than 10 times a day. E-membership is only $15 and will ultimately have lots of benefits. One would expect we could quickly attain 650 members and I would expect possibly twice that. The real number would likely be between the 650 and the 53,000. The number of subscribers to DG fell from 8,000 when it was sold to a corporation that was looking to extract big profits through a rather annoying amount of advertizing. It no longer was being perceived as a service. And the philanthropic gesture of becoming a subscriber to support the site was muted. The lesson we should take is that if we provide great services and do not try to get greedy we have enormous potential with the combination of the free Iris Encyclopedia and the electronic membership. But DG also points out you can mess up a good idea if you do not execute it well. |