This list isn't a SLAS list, but many SLAS members are members, so here's my 2 cents. Non-SLAS members, thanks for bearing with this discussion. Ann asks some good questions. Just what does the club want the purpose of NOVA to be? How important is swelling club ranks? Supposing one day, 3 or 4 hundred people were coming to monthly meetings. That's a lot of folks to keep entertained every month and suddenly Board positions might mean the hourly equivalent of a part or full-time job. That high a number is not a realistic figure in the short-term, I readily admit, but it leads to the question of how much effort is the club willing to put into recruiting X number of new members? (And BTW, that number of attendess is realistic for certain events, especially when combined efforts with other clubs or institutions, or national events. It may be the norm sooner than we think.) Does outreach and education have to translate into more memberships? Or is the good deed itself enough reward? If the newsletter is designed around recruitment, it will of necessity become repetitive and less meaningful to current members and old-timers. Can a balance between marketing/advertising and useful information for the rank-and-file be achieved? I'm currently not in a position to devote much time to my side interests and hobbies, but 30+ years ago, the club meant a chance to spend some time every month with people I knew pretty well and liked to talk telescopes and astronomy with. It was a kind of social balance to the star-party nights where folks were concentrating and paying closer attention to their senses. Meetings were sometimes conversations rather than lectures- and they were darn fun and very interesting! Imagine a conversation with a professional astronomer, scientist, or engineer, rather than a lecture by one. How many of us remember that little talk by Carl Sagan at Westminster College back in the pre-Cosmos days? Talking with him face-to-face after his presentation? To me, a few close relationships will trump the glow of belonging to a beehive multitude every time. Even my most memorable star-parties are not the large ones, they are the smallish ones spent with a few folks whom really meant a lot to me. Your mileage may vary; I know some folks like large organizations, and that's OK, too. Ann is right about not needing generic "S&T" material to fill a club newsletter. The old newsletter smelled of ditto ink (my contemporaries will recall that smell I'm sure), was rife with typos, and kept us updated with the astronomical activities of our fellow club members. And we all looked forward to it! I think that the primary purpose of a club newsletter should be to nurture the ties that bind us as a local astronomical "family". Marketing should be a separate effort, with perhaps only a small section of each newsletter devoted to recruitment. Thanks for your time! --- Ann House <ann@annhouse.org> wrote:
Some thoughts of mine about the NOVA...
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com