Like any other organisation in today's economic climate we have ensure we closely manage our costs in order to survive. We have recently undertaken a review of our expenditure. Printing and postage of our newsletters take up a considerable proportion of our income in any one year. With a printed newsletter now costing 46p each to send out to nearly 750 addresses its costs the Association nearly £350 in postage alone and that is without the cost of printing the newsletter
This e-newsletter on the other hand is sent out to nearly 800 people and the cost compared to that of of producing and distributing a printed version is miniscule, a few pence in fact.
Our wish is to maintain the current level of members' subscriptions; in order to achieve this and at the same time maintain a good level of communications, we have taken the decision to change the way we publish our printed newsletters. From now on we will publish three, rather than five printed newsletters each year which will be be posted to all members. They will be published in March, September and December. At the same time we will adjust our publication dates to ensure that you will receive your printed Newsletter at the beginning of the relevant month. In addition, we will produce a printed version of the monthly e-newsletter to be posted to those members who do not have access to email, we expect this to be around 50-80 of our members.
Our Annual Report will continue to be published and sent out to you in June.
We will continue to send out our regular e-newsletter on the first day of each month to all our subscribers
By implementing these changes and reducing our expenditure on postage and printing we hope we can keep membership subscription rates at the current level for the forseable future.
We would also like to explore the idea of sending out our printed newsletter and possibly the annual report in electronic format, i.e. Pdf format. Bearing this in mind we would appreciate all our members thoughts on this idea. Please let us have your thoughts, and leave us your comments below
Comments
1) announce that from now on all reports, newsletters and and information alerts will be sent electronically
2) provide to THOSE MEMBERS WHO REQUEST IT a contact name who will keep track of those members who need to receive a hard copy
There is evidence that many people [not just MA members] do not actually read the hard copy material posted to them by the groups they belong/subscribe to.
A tighter mechanism to use cost effective electronic delivery modes, WITH a well targeted hard-copy system would serve to reduce both costs and volunteer man labour.
Otherwise the printed version can become much less glossy and just be a copy of the elctronic information in a simple printed (photocopied0 format (ie a pdf).