On Wed, Aug 12, 2020 at 06:11 PM, RCardona wrote:

Only about 10% of our membership made a donation, but sufficient funds were raised to fund the membership group for 2+ years.

And therein lies the problem. On your own admission you have 90% freeloaders.

Chris

I think using the term "Freeloaders" is inappropriate here. Chris, you apparently have a group of younger, affluent, working members. There are a number of groups that have a certain fraction of retired members. They may be on fixed incomes or not. From the description, I would suggest you know nothing about the makeup or purpose of RC's group, and you are making assumptions that show your lack of understanding.

I have a few of my groups that I took Premium and I pay for those myself. Part of the reason is that I have a number of members who are barely on the internet (as I term it, they are in the extreme right hand lane of the information highway), but the experiences and information they bring to the group to share are priceless. Members bring to the table what they have. Some have vast experience to share. Some come seeking that knowledge and have the ability to help support that exchange. And some come seeing information and guidance.

Implying that any member is a "freeloader" without knowing the specific situation is, in my mind, out of line, especially given the state of public decency, or lack thereof, in public discourse today. Such comments will get you pigeonholed in some people's minds and can harm your credibility in the long run.

Dano

Chris, 
I have almost 3800 spread around the globe with majority in the US.
There were two of us. 400 miles apart.  I took care of the money and processes.
When we started I received international money orders and US domestic checks.
In addition, we received somw actual cash from some in our home country, USA.
We went to PayPal as a means to make it more simple for us and for members.

As someone said, if you believe in what you doing and you get enought to support your group, you've got it made.
Just be sure to thank every person with a note..  Tell them in the note what their money will be used for.

But remember what someone recently said about whether you  believe in what the group is doing.
--

Bob Bellizzi

This is not unusual in groups that have functioned for decades with free membership, and I’m not sure these good people should be described so derisively..  

Non-donators contribute to our genealogy site in a variety of others ways by way of sharing information and research.  Money is NOT the only manner in which one can contribute to a group.  You should have more faith in your members to support your group through donations.   If you have a valued group, I'm willing to bet more than enough donations would come in to support whatever membership level you may require for your group.   There are a variety of tools available to make this happen for any group.

That is how most non-profits work as well. . . those who believe in the mission and are able, support the financial part of a group.  And many more benefit from it irrespective of financial contribution.  

Robert

chris jones via groups.io wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2020 at 06:11 PM, RCardona wrote:
> >
> > Only about 10% of our membership made a donation, but sufficient funds
> > were raised to fund the membership group for 2+ years.
>
> And therein lies the problem. On your own admission you have 90%
> freeloaders.

Therein lies what problem? Actually, I read that as "members saw so
much value that we cut off the fundraising when we realized we were
way past our current needs". That's definitely what would happen
in any of my groups.

paul
=----------------------
paul fox, pgf@foxharp.boston.ma.us (arlington, ma, where it's 85.3 degrees)

On Wed, Aug 12, 2020 at 06:11 PM, RCardona wrote:

Only about 10% of our membership made a donation, but sufficient funds were raised to fund the membership group for 2+ years.

And therein lies the problem. On your own admission you have 90% freeloaders.

Chris

As dual-owner of a premium group of about 250 members, we did a donation drive via PayPal and Stripe.  Only about 10% of our membership made a donation, but sufficient funds were raised to fund the membership group for 2+ years.  International funds were consolidated into a single currency, no problem.  We appointed a treasurer who will be paying the annual fee from the monies raised.   Many tools out there to collect monies for groups.

Robert

On Wed, Aug 12, 2020 at 05:23 PM, Robin Whittle wrote:

USD$220 a year is about Australian $1 a day - and its worth it to know I have a good, ad-free, long-term reliable system for running what is always going to be quite a time-consuming project. 

Yeah, right. And how do you propose that a group with nearly 2000 members spread throughout the world (but mainly in the UK) should collect that money? Or are you assuming that the Owners/Moderators will simply pay it themselves?

I fully understand the reasoning that has lead to these changes, but I wish that people would put a bit more thought into the practicalities of collecting the money required should it become necessary to pay for a "legacy basic" group. In some cases I daresay it would be fairly easy; in others more or less impossible.

Be careful what you wish for...

Chris

Regarding Mark Fletcher's changes: https://beta.groups.io/g/main/message/25893

Stan/jp wrote, in part:

Just a thought, but, what about creating a "Free" plan that
is mailing list and possibly Wiki only, and keeping "Basic"
as is but adding a nominal monthly charge ($5/month ?). This
avoids legacy plan tracking.

Those on the Basic plan who only need mailing list can
downgrade to Free plan if they wish. The Wiki feature would
be used to document rules-of-engagement, and links to other
sites for files/photos/etc.

This seems like a good idea to me, but I can't anticipate how Mark wants and needs to run his business. 

The private group I run could exist as a current Basic group, but I chose to pay for Premium for three reasons:

1 - I greatly value the groups.io system.  In terms of pure time and motion, it is worth paying for a system like this which is very carefully thought out and, in my experience, beautifully implemented, without being infiltrated by the Googleplex's data vacuuming plumbing and without adverts and extraneous stuff like Yahoo Groups.   Also, I had enormously positive experiences 20 years ago with Yahoo Groups and am happy to support the guy behind it, whose social, programming and entrepreneurial experience and energies all came together to create what later became Yahoo Groups, and now this much improved Groups.io system which seems to work perfectly with HTML emails.

2 - I wanted to be able to directly add members if they had some difficulty navigating the normal system for joining.

3 - I really wanted at least one sub-group - for "Other Topics".   I used a separate Yahoo Group for this in the past and it was a vital part of maintaining the signal-to-noise ratio of the main group.   Discussion mailing lists are potentially wonderful, powerful, arrangements, but they are fragile.  Crap on the main list, in the eyes of the recipient, will drive people away very quickly.  This is especially so for some of the very busy academics and management people I want in the group.  In principle this could be done with a separate private Basic group, but I wanted it encompassed by the main group.

Some other reasons include being able to edit the archives to get rid of extraneous quotations (I never figured out how to train members to do this when replying) to make the archives easier to read and search - and the simple, clear, graphic design of the whole system.   Full integration of a robust mailing list system and web archives with web posting is a very difficult thing to achieve - and it even has measures against viruses.

The Basic group would have been OK, though I guess eventually we would hit the 1GB attachment limit.   I have left the Chat option open, but no-one has tried it yet.  I turned off Database, Calendar, Photos, Polls and Wiki to keep things simple.  Files are active and I guess we might use that someday.   I might enable the Wiki once we get more members.  I haven't looked into hashtags but I can imagine them being very useful if and when the discussions become more structured than in the current early days.

Some of us have out-of-date concepts of the value of money.  USD$220 a year is about Australian $1 a day - and its worth it to know I have a good, ad-free, long-term reliable system for running what is always going to be quite a time-consuming project. 

I think most people have no idea what it costs them to rely on advertising supported systems.   If you are not paying money  for it, you are the product.   Facebook is total brilliance in this regard - even better than network TV: there's no need to create any programs etc.  Just sell people back to their friends and then most people, to stay "connected" have to be a part of this advert-infested thing for most of their waking hours.   The cost of the advertising is far more than financial.  It is a pervasive suck on the psyche.

Thanks Mark!

    Robin