"State of the Club Address"
This message is also posted in the Members only section. If you can read it there, add your reply there. For those of you that can not access that area, post your comment here. This is important information, please take the time to read it.
As most of you know Charlie doesn't have the time he use to, to tend the flock. What does that mean for us? It's time for us to become financially self sufficient as well as technically self sufficient.
Technical: Charlie is working with me on this area and we've made a lot of progress in the last couple of days. I believe I can take care of the routine maintenance on the message board and the pix board if we can bring it back to life. Charlie is working that site over with a big hammer this week to see if it's savable.
In the future it might be a good idea to have a second guy up to speed on this stuff as well. For the really complicated stuff like software upgrade, moving to our own server and picking up the pieces after a site crash, we will need professional help. We've had some preliminary talks with one of the founders of Bloody Decks who is a whiz on this stuff.
Financial: This is where we all need to step it up and show our support for the club. This message board, the bocapix site and the followingsea site are on rented server space that we will need to pick up the cost for. Charlie has us covered for the next 8 to10 months on his server space. Come next fall we will need to pay $40 to $50 a month for server space. We may be paying Charlie for that space, or we will pay someone to move everything to a new server and pay them for the space. The annual cost of server space will be $480 to $600 based on the estimates we got last week. If we choose to upgrade any of our software, tack another $100-$200 to our cost that year.
Let's take about software. Our current message board works find and meet our needs. Our picture site is broken and Charlie is looking into getting that back online for the $88 I was quoted from PhotoPost. If we can get it back online for less than $100, that could be our most economical solution for our photo needs. The maker of out message board software (V Bulletin) is coming out with new software at the end of the year that will have photo hosting built into it. I believe it will run us close to $200 for that up grade.
Over the years there may have been 10 or 12 of us were pitching Charlie a 20 at the BBQ to help with the cost of running the site. Do the math, we didn't come close to covering the cost.
Raising funds: We had some conversation at the BBQ and I continued those talks with Charlie this week about ways to raise funds. In the past if you contributed once, your status was change to BOCA Member and you never lost that status. That might change. An idea tossed around was, if you contribute you will have BOCA Member status for that year. If you are unable to financially support the site, your status will be changed to Senior Member. Everyone wants to know what they get for their money. We talked about moving all the fish report topics into the members only area, like the MB Marlin Club does. You will also have photo hosting privileges. If you don't support the site, you won't be able to read our fish report or have us store your photos. Does that sound fair?
In closing I would like to say we have time to think this out and do the right thing for the club. We have 8-10 months left of riding Charlie's coat tails, but come next fall we need to be self sufficient. We can always take the proactive approach and make our move sooner.
I would like to hear what you guys think about the future of the club.
Mike
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