Club Expenses
Ideas for Controlling Outflow
by Jack “FROSTY” Frost
Corvette City Bop Club; Bowling Green, Kentucky
If your club is like ours, spending money that you don’t have is a real problem. No matter how you produce your club’s newsletter: laser printer, photocopier, or internet; there is considerable expense and effort to the whole process.
Let me enumerate:
 | Someone’s got to physically generate the words on the page |
| If you’re doing a mailing, it must be constructed, laid out on the page, and |
 | Photocopied |
| Collated |
| Stapled |
| Folded |
| Stamped |
| Mailing labels affixed |
| Mailed |
The club newsletter serves to keep the members feeling connected and a part of a caring, fun, social environment. Often the newsletter is the only way sporadic attendees will ever find out about what’s going on in the club. There is no doubt that every club should have some way to keep in touch with every member on a regular basis. NOW FOR THE SOLUTION J J ...
Use your club’s website as the newsletter. How??? Your webmaster should have each and every page of the website on the hard drive of the computer used to maintain the club’s site. Every member who does NOT have internet access, contacts the webmaster and gets on a mailing list of those to receive hard copies out on an agreed schedule (monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly). The webmaster simply copies all of the web pages to a floppy disk – cost is LESS THAN TEN CENTS – for a floppy, and mails the floppy to the member. True, there is still is the postage cost to mail the floppy, but the number of members with no internet access should be extremely small in this day and age.
There is one essential component in this strategy that cannot be avoided – the club MUST have a viable website. Many clubs have one, but not all clubs are successful in executing up to date maintenance of their site. If you go to a club and they are still promoting an activity that occurred months ago, or the latest photos are 2 years old, or page links no longer operate, that’s when you know your site is not earning its keep.
If your club is having difficulty successfully maintaining its website, the A.B.A. has the solution you’re looking for in our special service. We can do all you need with regular monthly updates of lesson schedules, photos, announcements, and special events. The ANNUAL cost for this service is just $100. Your club buys the domain and pays for the hosting service, the A.B.A. then does all the maintenance work – so you’ll be able to save far more than the $100 in postage and photocopying alone. Interested??? Contact me at: frosty2@insightbb.com