Joseph White said in his comment that we can’t blame membership dropping on Sal. Aw, why not?  The reason people are not renewing is STARFLEET is too expensive and stuff like groceries, rent, and gasoline come first. I am sorry, Joe, but I have to call bullshit.

Scott Akers also touched on this point while I was writing this post. $22 for a family membership breaks down to just over six cents a day. I guarantee that these “poor people” spend more than six cents a day on lottery tickets, cigarettes, beer, condoms, or even M&Ms. I that the money is not the real reason. I am pretty hard up sometimes financially, and I find a way to renew.

The only way it could be the money is if the member percieves no return on the investment. It’s the age old question that members of all chapters face every time they renew. What has STARFLEET done for me lately? The converse is, naturally, You get out of STARFLEET what you put into it. Lower membership dues? No, that would really hurt STARFLEET more than help.

Don’t raise the membership rates to combat costs! Perhaps we should as an organization take steps to cut costs. Here’s some ideas:

Stop printing the CQ. OK, there are a host of arguments here. They range from misguided numbers to the outright absurd. Some misconceptions:

We need to print xx copies to get the USPS discount. Yes and no. We get the discount by volume, but it still is a per-piece cost. If we are printing fewer, we’ll need to mail fewer. Do you know how many “paper chapters” we have out there? Without giving away names, I know one commanding officer that has eight family memberships in his pocket. He gets eight copies of the CQ when it is mailed. Eight. That is seven issues right there that did not need to be printed.

We need to print a certain number to keep our deal with the printers. I’m sorry, have you seen CQ 146 and CQ 147? They were ugly, poor color separation, faded, and by the time they get to your door they look like they’ve been on a subway seat for a week. Apparently quality has not been a factor lately.

It’ll cost more to print a better CQ. Again, yes and no. Per item? Certainly. But if we print fewer, the overall cost will be less. Make the printed CQ a premium item that members must pay extra for.

Not everyone is online. True. But how long are we going to cater to the luddites? We’re not an Amish fan club. We pretend we’re in the 24th Century, it’s high time we live in the 21st!

What about blind, elderly, disabled? Fine. I am sure that with all we save on the printing and distribution of the CQ, we can afford to offer a number of complimentary issues to those with special needs. Isn’t there a Fleet Resource Center office for such things under the Office of the Vice Commander?

Stop mailing and printing membership materials.  See above. No more CDs except by special request. If they are disabled, special arrangements can be made. Fleet owns a couple of printers, we can print what we need as needed on a case by case basis. Make everything available for download. They can print the certificate and ID cards themselves. Or if they want a spiffy card, fancy bound manuals, etc, the Quartemaster can sell them a nice one.

Make all the forms in the organization available online.  Not just for download. Let them be able to be filled in Adobe Reader, and then emailed, or later printed and mailed by post. Nobody wants to download a form, print it, whip out a pen and fill it out! I am positive some of our volunteers have a full version of Adobe Acrobat. If not, it’s cheap enough and would save the organization money in the long run.

Automate the Academy. Postage costs, certificate printing, can be automated with the right software. Take the test online, download the completion certificate as a PDF, let them print it themselves.

Lower chapter requirements. Drop chapter requirements to 5 members. Eliminate the difference between “correspondence” and “meeting” chapters. When Al Gore invented the Internet, the lines got all blurry. Offer stuff electronically to COs, NX Training chapters, etc. All certificates, manuals, etc.

Reinstate chapter fees. Something low, like $10. In addition, make them annual as well. Chapter COs would get a printed copy of the CQ included. They would also get access to flier templates, brochures, recruiting supplies, business cards either at a discount or as free downloads.

Just a few thoughts. Discuss.

I am almost convinced we’re beating an equine with no detectable life signs here at the STARFLEET Fail blog lately anyway. We were ALMOST to that point in July, then “The C&D Letter” came down. Hits went through the roof in less than a week. And other people started posting, too. I went from an average of 18 visitors a day to several hundred. Today, mid June, I still average 82, almost 4 times what I was in June. But other stats are dropping, percentage of new users, “bounce rate,” meaning how many folks land and go away right away, people are not sticking around as long (down from 8 mins to about 3 mins in the last 4 weeks.)

It may simply be I have been busy assisting my CO in offering a bid for the 2010 Region 2 Summit for our chapter to be held in Tampa. I love my CO, but the old coot’s getting ambitious. Now he is thinking of also submitting one for IC 2011 as well before the January deadline. I’d love the idea of an IC in my back yard, there has not been one in the “deep south” since 2004 in Birmingham and not one in Florida (the only one in the Sunshine State) since Orlando in 1994. I’d say it’s time to show some “Cigar City Hospitality!”

Maybe STARFLEET Fail has run its course? Or maybe it’ s just a slow couple of weeks, but there has not been any “FAIL” to report.

Sal showed up to our Region 2 IRC Monday night. Some folks asked some tough questions, and he answered them. I called him on a few, too. Showed him he was wrong, like the current financial figures are not in CQ 147 as he stated. Page 20 of that CQ only has up through April 2008. The RC’s only have through May 2008, too. This stuff needs to be released. He says he will instruct his staff to release those figures ASAP to the SFI.ORG member area.

Good. So Sal communicated. Once. Keep it up,Santa, and there may be more than coal in your stocking this year.

But the rumor mill also reports that Sal relieved long time Awards Director Liz Woolf. Basically “removed it from her plate” I believe was the term. Liz was awesome at that post. Makes you wonder if this is not some political favor being cashed in.

Yeah, we may just be slipping. The last post that could be construed as “negative” was August 4, and that was a comment about the Space-X rocket losing Doohan’s ashes for the third time. Good thing he was a chubby, they should have plenty to spare, right? (oooh… that ain’t nice… gonna go to Hell for that one!)

Maybe the Elven Regime and STARFLEET will unfuck itself. We may run out of material. You know what? GOOD! I’ve said it many times on the site, I’ll say it here. If STARFLEET works well, everyone communicates, and nothing goes awry, there is no FAIL. When the day comes, my friends, I’ll be happy to tear the damned thing down.

Opinions?

Commodore Jonathan Lane, 20 year veteran of STARFLEET and longtime member of the USS Angelas has been appointed to replace Peter Christian as the new STARFLEET Chief of Communications. This is a win, in my opinion. Mr. Lane does not fall into my definition of “Sal Pal” so we may actually see some good things done in his wake. Maybe I should pass on a small wishlist:

1. Teach Praish the value of proper color separation in the printed CQ
2. Make Praish stop creating the online CQ with a black background so it can be printed or read without retinal scarring
3. Put articles about Star Trek in a bimonthly newsletter for Star Trek fans
4. Print Alex R.’s articles, damn it, so I don’t have to hear him talk about it in #starfleet (kidding, Alex!)

Linkage

It has been an neverending source of amazement to me that no matter how low things get in STARFLEET, somehow the sense of who and what we are never seems to get lost.  

Without going into needless and boring detail, my mother suffered one life threatening and one very serious medical problem, one right after the other, spending the largest part of 16 days between Intensive Care and step down units.  I notified Peter, who is both the CO of our chapter and a good friend of over 20 years, and the SFI List Mods group that I would be pretty much out of pocket as they say.  Pete took it upon himself to post what was going on to various lists, which I had not problem with.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I wondered when an Executive Committee member would post a comment on STARFLEET Fail. I assumed, well, that it would be a cold day in hell. I was wrong. As often as I report a Fail of this administration, I most certainly enjoy reporting a WIN!

Matt Moyer, the current STARFLEET CompOps under the Lizard administration, posted a comment last night. He outlined some of the membership benefits that are now a reality for STARFLEET members. There are special account numbers and PIN numbers in effect. Members can take advantage of these discounts RIGHT AWAY. This includes any Choice Hotels, Brooks Brothers, Enterprise Rental Car, and Office Max. There will be other programs comin gonline in the near future as well. For more information about these programs, including the required account numbers and such, go to SFI.ORG and log in. Your login name is your SCC#, and your password is the same as your password for the membership database.

As an aside, I am glad Matt likes my idea for a YES/NO sort of API for the STARFLEET database that I mentioned in the comments as well. I still say most strenuously that something like this could speed up business in STARFLEET a hundred fold. Especially in things that are notoriously slow, such as the Academy.

And how cool is it that it’s ENTERPRISE Rental Cars? Huh? Huhh?? I mean really!

Thanks, Matt!

A privately funded rocket was lost on its way to space Saturday night, bringing a third failure in a row to an Internet multimillionaire’s effort to create a market for low-cost space-delivery.

What makes this so ironic? What makes this Star Trek related? This was the rocket carrying the ashes of  James Doohan, who played Captain Montgomery Scott, the crafty engineer of the original USS Enterprise. Somehow, Scotty survived to be seen in the original series, the animated series, Star Trek: The Next Generation (held for 75 years in a transporter buffer, no less!) and seven feature films.

Scotty would never have let this happen. I’d say that’s an EPIC FAIL!

Linkage. Hat tip to David Ryan, USS Marathon

Update: There’s more from Wil Wheaton’s blog.

James Doohan’s son Erich wrote an essay about the failure of SpaceX to take is father’s ashes into orbit last week. It’s absolutely heartbreaking.

There have been many attempts to send my father on his way. On Saturday, the latest launch attempt by SpaceX, with a portion of my father’s remains aboard, failed to achieve orbit. While there are many complicated reasons why this is a disappointment, mine is simple: I’d like to finish saying goodbye.

Every launch attempt is like reliving his funeral. There’s a lot of pomp and ceremony, and a retelling of his deeds in life. But at the end of these funerals, something goes awry, the body doesn’t get buried, and you know you’re going to have to come back to do it over again.