At the end of Winter term, the active club members (that is, the exec plus others) went over the club budget and tried to figure out where all our money was going, as we seemed to be barely on-side financially. We found out that the 2 main expenses for the club were advertising and Zip.ca, each costing over $100/term. Knowing that UWGamers runs on a much smaller budget (pretty much $0) and still seems to have a degree of success equal to or greater than ours, I figured I'd take some initiative in trying to figure out what they're doing that we're not (or the other way around) and how we could reduce our expenses. Here's the forum thread I started over there; perhaps current and future execs (and particularly Karl and Bessie) would like to take a look:
http://uwgamers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=834
Comments welcome.
So the biggest difference that I could see (besides posters) is that they charge per event. The problem is that we can't legally do that (I think it was brought up last meeting, charging a few bucks to people without memberships) and still show anime. Uguu...
Also they don't do FEDs runs and they don't print in colour. Those are probably our 2 biggest costs. It would be interesting to find out, of the new people who come to CTRL-A shows, how many are brought in by each of E-Comm mailings, posters, or good old word of mouth. Perhaps if we can gauge that, we can gauge how much we need to spend on posters and where our core people-catching spots are. Spamming the whole campus seems to be somewhat analogous to trying to kill a fly with a shotgun in this case.
The Zip.ca budget was discussed at the beginning of this term and the number of disks was shifted from four to two to cut it in half, so that's become something of a non-issue simply because we didn't feel we wished to lose it altogether.
As far as posters go, their effectiveness might be hard to gauge, although it's good to see them because that means the information is at least out there giving people the chance to come in. If we didn't do that, people wouldn't know what was happening at all. And not everyone goes everywhere on a university campus - I went to Lakehead three years and really only saw the inside of like three of the many buildings. If you didn't post posters in some buildings over others, a person could never know there was an anime club.
As far as I know (since we discussed this too), the posters printed off of the printer are low in cost and so that cost becomes much less of an issue as well, colour or otherwise. We don't have a financial report for this term but it doesn't seem like we went 'all out' money-wise.
So that leaves the FEDS runs.
I'm not sure what you're saying about this Zip.ca thing. Doesn't Zip.ca charge the same price whether you rent 2 disks or 200 disks? And if you're only getting 2 discs (a $60 value, roughly) and you're paying $100 for it, doesn't that mean you just pitched $40 into the trash? Or am I missing something?
As far as I can tell, only a couple new people show up to shows who aren't core club members (that is, people who show up to meetings or people who always show up to shows anyway). While I'm not saying cut the posters entirely, Leo Tao (cubesquared on the UWGamers forum) mentioned he saw multiple CTRL-A posters *in the same place*. Is that really necessary? For example, if we print enough posters to put 3 on every board, aren't we paying 3x too much for the posters? Why isn't 1 sufficient?
I don't know where FEDs puts our posters, but, given the membership of the club and the locations they go to, I'd say the best places to put posters would be to poster up the MC, SLC, and DC as much as possible, put a few in HH and ALH, and maybe some outside the WEEF lab or Poets. As a general rule, ES and AHS students tend not to come anyway (I don't know a single member of CTRL-A who is in ES or AHS), and most of our core membership are (or have once been) Math or Science students. Postering up all the Science buildings would take *a lot* of work (unless Amy can do it), but I know a lot of Science students hang out in DC, which is why I recommend there. The SLC is obvious, and most Engineers go to either the WEEF lab or Poets (and the ENG C&D beside Poets) at least from time to time.
But I think the best way to get people out to the shows is still E-Comm and word of mouth. I know I don't even look at the posters (except to notice they're there); I get my CTRL-A news from the E-Comm mailings, and when I say "CTRL-A" to people, many of them still don't know that the club exists, despite posters.
No, Zip.ca charges you a cost per month based on the amount of disks you're allowed to rent at a time. It was something like $20 for four and somewhere in the $10 range for two. We decided to drop it down to two because that way we could make use of it if we needed it. There were some other issues surrounding that later in the term that I won't get into on the forum, but I think it's important to have a back up because we can't all own everything, and we want to allow the membership to suggest the shows they want to see, even if we don't have it because that's a draw.
Not everyone is on the Ecomm list though, because I think it usually gets updated at the beginning of term and then sometimes when they buy memberships. If they haven't bought a membership they don't get the news. Gary mentioned quite some difficulty with that, but he's been added to the list now.
As for the three posters in the same place, I don't think the volunteers or Mo were doing that, so that could have been FEDS. *shrug* We did most of our posters on the printer this term and I think that cut the costs back. I'm not even sure Mo made the last FEDS run because she missed the deadline. But again I don't have numbers for this, I only recall the costs discussed when we talked about Zip.ca and the decision we made was not to scrap it altogether.
I'm not entirely sure if money is that big of an issue (I have no idea of the clubs financial status), but if it is, maybe membership card costs should be considered? Would it not make sense to just create generic cards to save money? It's a bit of an honours system, but we've already done that with guest policy anyway, right?
With regard to posters, it may be sufficient to either do just Feds poster runs, or just poster by hand; I believe that in a previous term Reinhold made some remark about doing some informal look at postering and noticing that the number of posters didn't make too much of a difference.
I don't think the club can rely on e-comm and the website alone for advertising: posters make people aware of the club; perhaps it would be worthwhile to have a large scale postering campaign at the beginning of term, and few small ones once a month?
I'm not convinced that money is an issue, but if it is, perhaps the above nuggets are worth considering.
Alright, I'm going to answer some of the questions on the UW Gamers thread and you are welcome to pass it on if you like, but you are giving misinformation, which doesn't help the club's image at all.
1. Why is Karl treasurer anyway?
Because every term he gets re-elected by the membership who may or may not know he's been treasurer a long time. Whether or not this is a good thing is a matter of opinion, but we do have a democratic election.
2. Membership fees are SO high!
Well let's see. This term the membership spent $8. The frosh spent $7 (although I don't think we had any). They received access to: 4 exec shows, 14 Wednesday night shows, 6 yester-term shows, 2 catch up marathons, 2 marathons, 1 karaoke night, 1 games extravaganza, 1 picnic (coming up), 4 general meetings with games, Anime 101 and about 7 mini-shows with Kyle during his office hours. This means the exec volunteers have put in about 207 hours and offered 207 hours of entertainment to the membership. How you spent that $8 is up to you but for those of us who attended nearly everything (and quite a few do) that's 0.038 cents an hour of entertainment. We don't charge you for anything else.
3. What about the grant from FEDS they get?
As far as I know we're not making use of it. If we are, I'm happy to be corrected on that, but I think we aren't. Karl would know though. I do believe we are eligible however.
4. But what about the other clubs who cost less?
How many of them charge per event? Some of them do. We don't.
5. Why don't we charge per event then?
We cannot charge for shows. If we did we wouldn't get permissions to show the anime because all of them have clauses that we cannot charge admission. If we don't have permission and AV comes looking and asking questions, we're not going to have anywhere to show anime at all. Charging admission would open up the fact we would have to pay for licenses to show things and that is going to cost us a hell of a lot more then anything we have now. Could we charge for non-show events? Yes we could. But the events are not that popular and I don't think we'd really make any money off of it, with the exception of maybe Karaoke. That one was really popular by comparison. But do we have enough non-show events to warrant this and are people willing to pay extra on top of their membership? Maybe not.
6. Why isn't the admission desk outside the doors?
Well then I would have seen no anime this term at all at the exec shows and Kyle would have seen none at Adam's. We don't have enough people willing to sit a membership desk. Who wants to sit there for six hours alone, or eight in Kyle's case? It's not really fair to the person who has to do that. People aren't exactly sneaking in though, because the numbers are pretty much matching the membership ones. It wasn't a hopping term.
7. So what's the deal with the library anyway?
The exec of this term were working on it. Everything has been itemized in the inventory, so we now know what we have that actually belongs to the club. Could people borrow from it? I don't see why not. Only one person has expressed interest in doing so and another borrowed one disk already this term. I guess it's more ask and ye shall receive kind of thing. All you have to do is peg down an exec. There's nine of us.
8. Continuations, what's up with that?
Well this was addressed this term with Fate/Stay Night. We held a catch up marathon, twice to get people caught up. It seemed to work, people were pleased we were taking care of it and no one missed the beginning of the series that way. For fall term, everything is starting at 1.
9. Showing a dedicated evening of one series, why not?
We had three marathons this term and people seem to really like them. It was suggested that we do some next term, and we have every intention of carrying that forward/passing it onto the next exec if it's not us.
That should clarify what has been going on this term Ertei, as you haven't been here you may not have realized some of the things the exec have been up to. We worked really hard and I think sometimes people diminish that. Don't forget, we're paying for the privilege of organizing these things for you in the end cause we have to buy memberships too.
-Amanda
CTRL-A President, Summer Term 2008
Thanks, Amanda. Let me rebut a few of your comments:
1) I understand the deal with Karl. I didn't say I'm against him running or whatever, I'm just saying that perhaps part of the problem is that perhaps, and I'm not saying for sure, but Karl's been a member of CTRL-A for a long time and may be used to the status quo. However, with the smaller numbers CTRL-A has had of late, perhaps we should be cutting back a bit. Instead on making a budget for the '98 fall term, we should be making a budget that properly reflects the '08 fall term. I trust Karl as much as everyone else, but a change is usually pretty good. Someone else should run for the position, though, perhaps using Karl as more of a mentor position than as a hands-on type of thing. I don't want to, because I don't think I'd be good at the job, but I think someone should.
2) What you say is true about time for money. I'm not arguing that you don't get a lot for your $8 fee. We are agreed on that. However, from the perspective of a new member to the club who really just wants a place he can go to hang out and meet people who share a common interest, whatever interest that may be, would you like to join the most expensive club on campus? Forget the $8 for a moment, and consider the price as a comparison. We are *the most expensive club* on campus. Period. And if you can get something for cheap or for expensive, most people would rather have it for cheap. Of course, they don't understand that a lot of work goes into it, etc etc, but only think about the price. I continue to come back to CTRL-A cause I've made a lot of friends in the club, I enjoy the events, and I feel like I'm a part of something worth being a part of. But I'll tell you, I've many times second-guessed paying my fees, just cause it's too darned expensive.
Also, while CTRL-A members do a lot of work, let's not diminish the work other clubs do. KonJa execs have 2 2.5 hour meetings per week, plus exec meetings, planning meetings, time spent doing preparation for the meetings (particularly the Language Exchanges), not to mention their term events like cooking days and movie nights and such. UW Gamers events, while generally few and far between, are 7 or 8-hour extravaganzas. CASA events, also few and far between, I'm sure require quite a bit of planning, as they generally rent out a space to hold their events in, so they have to organize that stuff as well as the actual setup and stuff. To say that "yeah, but we put a lot of work into it" isn't really an issue in this situation, because other clubs also put a lot of work into their stuff. It's not like we work so hard and everyone else sits on their hands or twiddles their thumbs.
And while it's true that CTRL-A doesn't charge per event, if it were legal, it would probably be a better idea. That way you don't hit the members with a huge fee upfront, and you can potentially make more money overall (charge $2/show over 6 shows instead of $8 upfront. Simple math shows that many people will end up paying more over time). So, while saying "we don't charge for anything else" is true, you also hit the prospective member with a huge upfront cost for services yet to be rendered. While I'm not faulting you for that (there really is no logistically sound alternative), it's something to consider.
3) We probably should get on that.
4) KonJa doesn't (except for the big events like Cooking Days, which they use to cover the food and stuff). Then again, they also have no costs. However, considering CTRL-A as a *club*, not as a mechanism by which to watch anime (probably part of the solution to the question of how to draw members in the face of fansubs), we are losing here, because most people don't care about how much the club pays, only what they pay. Yes, it's true we have to do it and all that jazz, but it's also something to consider.
5) I don't know what to say here. Something to consider for a future exec discussion. I don't know if anything can be done about this.
6) Right, and this really does mirror what I told the Gamers. People in CTRL-A want to watch anime. They don't want to man a membership desk. It's not fair, and, as you said, it's not really necessary, but if we were to charge admission (which we obviously won't), it would be necessary, and profitable too.
7) I've made this suggestion in a previous term and I'm going to make it again: Instead of paying Zip.ca to get disks, instead, why don't we buy the disks we need and build up the library? Then we can start advertising the library and using it to draw members. Then we can also re-show whatever we want or allow members to get caught up on anime without worrying about disk availability. It may also help to cushion the continuity issues.
Regarding what Nick said about the membership cards: I remember this was also discussed in the financial meeting in April. We found that we weren't paying that much for membership cards. However, KonJa uses a generic membership card and simply writes the name and term appropriate to the card for the person. Yeah, we could do it, and it would definitely save some cash. Do we want to? Is it worth it? Maybe.
Regarding the posters: I use the posters to remind me that an event is coming up, but I don't have the time to write down the date or time when I see a poster. I find the e-comm mailings much more useful for that. We should probably push for people to be added to the E-Comm list on Clubs Days, and probably find a way of allowing people to self-add or self-remove from the E-Comm list. I don't know enough about webscripting to know if this is feasible, but I'd be interested to know if anyone does.
We are *the most expensive club* on campus
That's not entirely true; I'm quite sure that, with the exception of juggling ($5 a term?), the various athletics clubs are more expensive, such as archery, kendo, fencing, dancing, fitness, etc.
Just wanted to point that out.