I think you have nailed it. There are a lot of older people who are online, but even then, we still have a lot who prefer to receive their newsletters via regular mail. Easier to read, they don't have to spend money on printing it themselves, I get all of that.

But, it also takes leadership from someone within the society to reach out to as many places as possible via as many sources as possible. Maybe they don't want to. Maybe they don't know how to. Maybe you could offer to post the dates for them. Or show their Publicity Chairperson (assuming that they have one) how to do it. I can't say that we get a lot of new people attending our show from posting it on GW, but I do it anyway. I know a few GW'ers from the NJ Forum stop by our table at the NJ Flower Show in Feb because I post that over on the NJ Forum.

I belong to our local society, and also post on the Oklahoma Forum. Both have problems. Our local society has wonderful members who travel an hour or so to our meetings. Because they have some trouble driving at night, our meetings are on Sunday afternoon. I have a full time job, and would attend meetings during the week, but on the weekend, I often want to do my gardening. Even though I live in the city, I need to drive about 25 minutes to the meetings, and I don't want to do that on Sunday. THerefore I only attend 3 or 4 meetings a year.

When I post on the Oklahoma Gardening Forum, I get many nice responses, but few people grow roses, so it has never occurred to me to post anything about our society's events.

I get our newsletter through my email, but I don't think too many members do. Those who do only use email. I don't think many are aware of Forums or even shopping online.

Sammy

It's really interesting how the internet/e-mail is being adopted by many rose societies. We now publish our monthly newsletter on-line, e-mailing it to members who prefer an electronic copy (they're finding we can do so much more in terms of photos and color with the e-copy). We still offer the option of a hard mailed copy to those who wish it. Like many other rose societies, we also have a website. These two options, combined with wonderful assets such as Garden Web, brings lots more information to folks in an easily accessible manner. But it takes one or two members who are computer savy to do this. It is only a matter of time before younger members, or members with work related computer experience, will affect more and more societies.

Here is a link that might be useful: Cherry Capital Rose Society web site

We did our rose society newsletters and used it to grow the society to over 100 members. But some missed the geriatric supper club and "took their society back" and now are fewer than 30 members, again.
Many younger folks wanted the newsletter and it was their reason for joining.
Our geriatric group includes some who were given computers and have never turned them on.
BUT the one option that an e-mail newletter can give them is their choice of TYPE SIZES. For those that need large sized book type, it could keep them involved. But it may be too late to use that as a recruitment tool.

*If* societies want to do an email newsletter they have to understand what the technology can and cannot do. Rose societies in particular seem to have trouble with the organizational death of a thousand cuts. Daytime meetings exclude people who work. An overemphasis on the bottom line excludes those who have different financial priorities or more limited income. When it comes to computers and rose organizations, there is a strong assumption that everybody has the same system and internet connection. So the pressure to move to the internet ends up excluding not only those without computers, but also those who have systems incompatible with what the rose gods have determined to be standard. And when you email to say you can't deal with that file type, they respond by resending exactly the same thing.

The really odd part is that in my house, this is almost exclusively a problem with rose organizations. Running club attachments are always in PDF. I'm getting garden organization meeting minutes in Rich Text. Over the summer, a camp form for my daughter first arrived as a .doc file, but less than an hour later was followed by an email apologizing for the proprietary format, and announcing that a PDF version would be going out the next day.

I've found that there is continuing resistance to NEWSLETTERS on line.
I wish that were not so, because MAN! Postal and printing costs are gonna bleed us dry.
But a slowly-increasing few are willing to move in that direction, and I think that's a good thing.
My own local ARS Society is going through an interesting transition.
NO ONE wanted to serve on the Board, or hold the necessary offices. We have, however,
found a full Board slate of people who value the Society, and who are willing
to serve IF most Board meetings can be conducted on line.
This possibility has brought us a good mix of new and "old" members, and I think it's going to be very good
for the Society.
With this energy at the helm, hopefully the Society as a whole will make more use of the Internet.

Jeri

My guess is a mixture of age-related with regional--many more people of every age are on line in the Silicon Valley area of California, (for example) than in some other parts of the country.

I started offering to send our club newsletter by email two or three years ago. About 1/3 of the newsletters are now sent that way, and it is saving the club a lot of money. Those who get it by email get it sooner and get color pictures. They seem very happy with it. The rest still would rather have hard copy they can hold in their hands and save in a binder. They could, of course, print out the newsletter and have a hard copy, but that seems to be out of the question. I suspect the change to electronic newsletters will continue to happen as time marches on.

The movement to electronic transmission of newsletters is both inevitable for ease of transmission and desirable from a financial viewpoint. The constant increase in actual outlay costs cannot be matched by a constant increase in society dues. We reached a point where it cost us twice as much to print and mail our newsletter than we were receiving in the form of dues. Operating at a constant deficit was not an option. There was, and is, resistance. You have to respect the views of those who would prefer not to have email in their homes, or their lives. But the question is how long do you want to subsidize them?

There is also the question of whether you send the traditional newsletter in pdf form, or actually create an email newsletter with different styles, fonts, etc. I think the latter is in its infancy, or possibly, still a twinkle in someone's eye, but it is probably another technological innovation that will be irresistible to those who can manage it.

For those souls who find the threat of phoning someone to renew membership a wholesale invasion of privacy, email is probably the best recourse around.

We have tried holding Board meetings online, and it works very nicely unless you get someone on the Board who is anti-listserve or receiving messages about Society business and the system breaks down. My own solution to such a problem person is to explain that they can receive listserves via daily digests and/or go to a website and read at their leisure. That usually doesn't work. So I wind up mailing them copies of the important emails periodically. And praying that they will not continue on the Board, as it is a major PITA.

A major theme in this thread is that time will take care of the problem of resistance to technology. It is a sobering thought to realize that a major contributor to changing rose societies is death. (tic)

JimD

So I wind up mailing them copies of the important emails periodically. And praying that they will not continue on the Board, as it is a major PITA.

*** In the context of an on-line Board Meeting, if you're dealing with a Board decision,
can you legitimately say at the onset that failure to respond with at the very least a yes/no vote
will be considered a Yes vote?

Jeri

The demographics- they are a-changin...
A printed newsletter is my local society's most costly expense. Our society is considering surveying the membership re this issue and researching cost/benefits.
Here's how one Society did it:

Brenda Landers-Smith discusses how one rose society converted to an e-mail format. Brenda is the designer of the 2006 award-winning ARS Queen of Local Websites, the California Coastal Rose Society.

The Coastal Rose Newsletter of the California Coastal Rose Society
By Brenda Landers-Smith, Editor

The first email newsletter of the ÂThe Coast Rose was launched in September, 2007. Here is the actual email as it first appeared on our website: ÂThe Coastal Rose. (www.californiacoastalrose.com) Go to WhatÂs New and click on September newsletter.
We have been told that the California Coastal Rose Society (CCRS) is the first in the United States to take this step in communicating with our members. Here is how we did it.
After the longtime CCRS newsletter editor resigned, we discussed the future direction of the newsletter. We began to look at the possibilities. Was now the time to change to an email newsletter?
Our research revealed that 85% of our members have Internet access. We also looked at our newsletter costs. The significant cost savings was an important element in our decision to go with an email newsletter. The savings were significant considering present and projected costs for postage, paper, and printing costs. In addition, we could eliminate many manpower hours spent labeling, collating, and folding of the paper newsletter.
We were concerned that the 15% of our members without Internet access might feel left behind in this endeavor. We needed a plan to address this problem. My thought was to organize a little group who would like to obtain their own free email account and to show them the vast potential of the Internet. We sent out a note along with the hard copy newsletters that read: "If some members would like to learn about the computer and use a computer at a public library to obtain the newsletter, I would be happy to take a group to the local library and show you how to obtain a FREE email account and give you basic information on how to use email and to surf the world wide web. Please call me if this is of any interest and we can plan a short meeting with a small group. There are no results yet to report on this offer.
The newsletter appears in its entirety in the body of the email; there is no need to download a document. It then offers direct links to the CCRS website as well as to other Internet destinations. These direct paths offer our members the best educational resources to grow better roses at the touch of a key stroke. The principle design concept was to make it simple, rich in content, yet lively with eye catching color, and, of course, roses, roses, roses.
In the future we will be offering creative and informative surveys, Âgifts, and other resources to our members through this new vehicle. We have only scratched the surface in connecting with our membership to the world of rose knowledge in a way that is convenient, innovative, and exciting.
Our E-newsletter connects the newsletter content to the CCRS website. I researched and experimented with several online marketing providers and found Constant Contact to be our best match for our budget and needs. The program is user-friendly and the customer support is on a par with other web building support systems. Their site is easy to navigate and has many safeguards to ensure your project is protected and easy to manage.
Our members have given 100% positive feedback to the visual appeal and high concentration on education in the first issue. In addition, the program we chose offers data tracking and analysis on each email. This enables us to immediately find out who did or did not receive their issue through bounce back tracking, opt out procedures for those who do not wish to subscribe, how many times the newsletter was read, and how many times links were accessed.
Most important, these features enable our newsletter to evolve with constant input from our members in reading it and to gauge the effectiveness of what we are doing. It is always scary to step outside the box of traditional practices, but this seems to promise both immediate and future rewards for CCRS members.
Questions about the process of changing to email newsletters can be addressed to Brenda Landers-Smith at ladybrenlanders@aol.com.

This re-posting from another publication calls to mind a problem I've recently been dealing with: Unauthorized forwarding of emailed text.
It is a big problem with Internet-based publishing.

You can TELL people 'til the cows come home that they must not forward material without specific permission of the original author.
You can ask, beg, and plead.

But it has been demonstrated over and over, however, that many people will simply ignore that, and post ahead.

That might not be so bad, IF all re-postings included a credit line, acknowledging the source, and
attesting that the permission of the author has been obtained, however, that doesn't always happen.

Jeri

they appear pretty cyber to me. both okc and tulsa

www.oklahomarosesociety.org and www.tulsarosesociety.org
I think if someone was interested in roses or a show they would link up with these through the ars's website.

I am a member of our local society but don't attend many meetings because scheduling is just too hard (wife and I both work full-time and have a young child). It actually took a hurricane to pull our group into the cyber age. There was an attempt a few years ago: the group launched a website. But it never went anywhere; too little traffic; never any new posts, etc. But when Hurricane Katrina blew our local mail system all to Hell (among many other problems), the group bulletin producers sent the word out that the bulletins would only be by e-mail for a while. I think people could pick up paper copies in person if they wanted to. Anyway, I think that finally got a lot of folks used to e-mail at last. It was so much easier that it has remained the conduit for the monthly bulletins. Easier and cheaper.

There are as many reasons for not "being in cyberspace" as there are people.

I could hardly be described as a Luddite yet I despise most email newsletters. I worked in tech support, and have a tech degree, and 2 professional computer certifications. Still I prefer my editor's exchange newsletters to be hard copy.

Why? because your average rose society email newsletter is poorly done. Creating a computer file for a paper publication is very different from creating a computer file for a cyber publication, and the latter is not a skill that's been very necessary until recently.

One major assumption people make is that everyone either has broadband internet at home, or can use their work email to receive personal email. These are not valid assumptions! But they go on to make email newsletters with ginormous file sizes because they want to include color photos. But, they don't seem to know how to compress those photos first, or to know when a photo really is unnecessary. Really, do we need to see yet another color photo of someone's Peace rose? we all know what it looks like by now! So I end up receiving newsletters that take 15 minutes (no exaggeration here) to download, and for what?? nothing much. One local society newsletter includes a color photo of each article's and column's author!!!!! boy, does that clog up the pipeline. It's nice to be able to put a face to the name, but at least make it a thumbnail so it downloads faster! we don't need a lot of resolution for that.

File type compatibility is an issue few understand, too, as Mad Gallica stated above. Not everyone has the Windows version of Office. There are very good reasons for people to use other software, and email distributors have to understand that they can't expect everyone to have one particular brand of software.

We have members who do not own a computer and who are retired. They're not going to be able to get a newsletter by email, period. I'm not willing to cut them off, especially when they've been very very active members for decades.

Another assumption is that people are getting these emails. Some of the major webmail providers that lots of people use, do not accept mass emails, or have file size limitations on individual mailboxes so that emails with large attachments simply disappear without arriving, or have overly aggressive spam filtering that deletes legitimate emails, or just simply are unreliable. No email service is 100% reliable. The USPS is much more reliable, overall. We tried once sending our newsletter by email but it just wouldn't go to aol or yahoo addresses, and that was half our list.

Our board has had email discussions before, but when people don't reply, you have to wonder if they didn't get the emails, which is a very real possibility.

Age is not really a factor in computer literacy here, we have older members who are extremely computer literate, but I know as you go farther into the hinterlands, away from centers of high-tech employment, the age of computer competency drops. It's always this way with any technological shift. The kids are learning it in grade school, but personal computers didn't even exist when I was in school.

We have a website, but it doesn't get a whole lot of traffic. Older people, who are more likely to be obsessed with roses, are less likely to think, 'Let's see if it's online!' But I think it's important to have one. It lets people find us for one, and it has a LOT of local cultural information on it that people can look up anytime, and it has our schedule and a map to our meetings and our show. Remember that the average age of posters on this forum is only 48, and I know that the bottom age group for members in our local society is basically mid forties.

Jerijen: THANK YOU for your comments on reposting other people's work. The same goes, I might add, for republishing other's work in your own newsletter, without even attribution. One side effect of emailing newsletters is it makes it that much easier for your work to be lifted and republished without permission, just like anything posted on the Web. I've always figured that so long as people attribute properly I don't need them to ask permission first, it's not like this is commercial property here, but I have one regular writer who would rather people ask first before reprinting his stuff.

Now: I wrote an article on how to make a good email newsletter, and it's been posted on the ARS website, and it's MY work so I can go ahead and post the link. Unfortunately it's hard to find so I don't think many people are going to see it otherwise. I won't bore you all by posting the whole thing here, those who want it can follow the link. Caution: it was posted in Word (.doc) format, rather than HTML or PDF. Here's something I've done before, and had work: save the file to your desktop, then change the file extension to a file type your computer CAN open, ie change .doc to .rtf or .txt. It'll look screwy because the formatting is lost but it should be readable.

THANK YOU for that, Regina! I'm going to sit down and read it all the way through.

As to re-use of articles, I don't know anyone who refuses to let their articles be re-printed.
But I also can't think of any writers who do NOT prefer that they be asked. Seems reasonable to me.
In fact, there are a few people who contacted me about articles, with whom I've subsequently formed real friendships.
Exchanging ideas! Cool thing to do!

Jeri

Thank You Sunnyrose for posting my article.

The CCRS, 'The Coastal Rose' Newsletter has been successful for the following reasons:

There are NO DOWNLOADS. The newsletter is in it's entirely in the email you open, the multitude of photographs, text, etc is NOT affected by the various connections.

If the user wants to save or print only a portion of the newsletter, they can cut and paste to their word processing program of choice.

We do mail out a plain text version to the small percentage of non Internet members.

Paper cost and conservation is huge in addition to time and postage.

Ease of use and ability to utilize a broader base of educational territory via the Internet has given us a new outlook on the purpose of the newsletter.

Seamless web transition unites the web site with the newsletter in one click.

Tracking enables an editor like myself to see who received it, who bounced - Immediately. No guessing who got it/who did not.

Reports also provide how many hits per link, giving the society a tangible idea of what is popular with readers.

My article points out that we are the first rose society in the U.S. using this method of newsletter. THIS IS NOT AN ATTACHED VERSION TO AN EMAIL, it is different.

Below please find a sample as it appears in the BODY of a members email. Note this has been added to our web site as a "sample" for the multitude of inquiries on this progressive step.

We have been running this for three months and the unanimous response has been embraced over and beyond our initial expectations.

Brenda Landers-Smith

I edit and publish the Phoenix Rose Society newsletter and it isn't a 'professional publication' as I'm the volunteer and publishing isn't my vocation. I love to see the beautiful e-letters from the other rose societies and have offered the PRS newsletter in .pdf for a year or so. There wasn't a huge number of requests but at the time I was trying to edit and publish another newsletter and burn-out was my constant companion besides the cost-savings needed by the societies. Once the membership was enticed with the idea they could receive that newsletter in COLOR, though, nearly 50% of them starting requesting email instead of hard-copy.

Published articles have a real or implied copywrite and shouldn't be used without proper credit. Same with photographs. I can't take a picture and have it come out looking anything like the subject so I borrow pictures from the internet but credit for the website or photographer is always given. I see a lot of previously published articles in various newsletters but none without some type of credit or disclaimer.

Hey Regina,

So far 128 people have downloaded your article from the ARS web site. Only 2 wrote to me to say they couldn't figure out how to find it - one in Silicon Valley, one in Washington State. Go figure ... .

It's a very good article and should help a lot of editors clean up their on-line newsletters. I will post a pdf version tonight (I thought you would want it in doc form so editors could manipulate the file if they wanted to print parts of it - sorry!).

- Jolene

Brenda, that was a wonderful newsletter, I really enjoyed it. I think you can do a lot more with an online newsletter, but certainly make it available in print for those who don't have online access.

But perhaps it will spur some of those people to go digital! My mom is 79 and is now online all the time. Having kids and grandchildren all over the country was the impetus for her, but perhaps for others it will be roses.