Membership Update

[Mike Fox]

Might not be convention related, but I have added 5 new members this week, one becoming a Life Member. Most if not all of these new members visited before joining.

[Bob Holmes]

Mike, how do I get listed on the discussion group as a Museum Member?  Thanks.

Bob

[Ed Lecuyer]

Hi Bob,

I have added you as a museum member in the forum database.

[If anyone is a museum member and does not have access to the "members only" sections (such as Newsletters) please let me know: ed@spongeawareness.com.]

Thanks,

-Ed

[Bob Holmes]

Thanks, Ed.  I never cease to be amazed by how responsive you guys are....

[Mike Fox]

15Th of the month is always busy in the membership office. Renewal notices go out for the next month, and reminder notices go out for the last month. For January, there are 58 members up for renewal, and 7 members from November that have yet to renew. Add those and the 10 thank yous I did and you get this stack for my rural mail carrier.

[Bill Sample]

Become a Life Member and reduce Mike's workload!

[Mike Fox]

Well the current Membership laptop that contains the database seems to be having some sort of display failure. I had tried a few things, asked James what to do, and he said I tried what he would have. I hooked it to an external monitor and was able to retrieve some information last night. Still not easy to work with. But everything was backed up a week ago, so no danger of loosing any membership info. Just slows down the process of processing the donations for now. Working on a permanent solution.

[Mike Fox]

I have made progress. We now have a back up program of our software running on my personal computer. This will become the primary database while we decide what to do with the museum laptop. We have always made and kept backups, with James running the same program off of my backups, so we will never have a complete failure of the database.

Luckily this happened before the annual fund drive when it is really busy. Hope to get the rest ironed out before then too.

[Allan Fisher]

Anything is possible. After Harry got sick, I took over the membership duties. We had 485 members and everything was handled on an old Brothers word processor. (i.e) every letter was customized and then typed out by the machine - it took forever.) James Patten - bless his hard working soul - got me on a new tailor made membership and donation program that I used on my PC at home. From 1998 until 2003, I picked up all mail at the Alna Post Office daily and all work was done in Maine at my home in Nobleboro.

Come December 2003, Ellen & I bought a house in the East Bay across from San Francisco. We lived in California 6 months of the year from 2004 thru 2008 when I gave up the administrative duties at the WW&F. During those 6 month periods, ALL WW&F mail was forwarded to my California address, and all dues, donation and business letters for the WW&F was originated by me and mailed from California. We know of no delays or lost mail during this time. There were over 1115 members by that time.

The difference back then was that all correspondence of any kind for the museum was done by me and me alone - sort of a dictatorship (but there was no lack of communications as I saw and controlled everything) - but thank goodness it seemed to work.

All should give many thanks to Mike, James, Gordon, Elizabeth, and the other volunteers that now handle this vital work of the museum.

[Bob Holmes]

As we consider upgrading our membership systems, have we given thought to data storage on the cloud.  An advantage of that is -- if we have more than one person involved in membership duties -- each could access the db independently.  The potential disadvantage is having more than one person accessing the db.  But that can be solved with appropriate rules and procedures.

The other advantage of course is that we don't have to worry about backups on individual computers.

Also if the s/w were on the cloud (if that is even possible -- I don't know), each user could access the entire system from their own hardware.  If not possible, would we be using readily available s/w such as Word, Excel and Access?

Just Wondering...

[Mike Fox]

The current program we are using has the cloud feature. We just have not moved to that yet, but is in the works.

[John McNamara]

Another possibility is a backup service such as Carbonite. That's what I use, and it has saved my butt a couple times.

[James Patten]

The cloud option is available for our software (BTW it's called Giftworks), but when I talked to them in June there were some features we use that weren't available yet in the cloud.  As soon as those features are available, we can go to the cloud.  They estimated in September - which disappointed me a little, as I was hoping to be on the cloud before the big hammer drop of mail from the fund drive in September, so that Mike's load could be spread out a little.  Once on the cloud, Mike may not need a museum laptop. 

Dealing with laptop monitors can be difficult.  My personal laptop a few years started having monitor issues (really dim).  I tried fixing it a few times, but it didn't help.  I'm not sure how old that laptop that Mike has is, but it's probably at least 5 years old.  It doesn't owe us anything.

[Mike Fox]

And yet, still having issues. Fortunately I was able to get the newsletter addresses ready to go as well as email the newsletter around.

[Bob Holmes]

Five years is really old for a laptop.  Mine was pushing 4 and started showing symptoms.  So I replaced it recently before it could crash and burn.  The good news is that they aren't nearly as expensive as they used to be.