Here we go again, on the budgetary roller-coaster...

[jducoeur]

As always, I'm a ways behind, so I don't know how much the news has gotten around -- probably quite a bit, but just in case:

The Society's President sent out an email yesterday, announcing (not really a big surprise) that the SCA has a budget problem. It's not really a single thing, more a confluence of many, but the result is a disconcerting $181k shortfall for this year, and a non-trivial $27k for next year even with some optimistic assumptions.

To their credit, they're not panicking this time around: they're asking for opinions on a basket of options, most of which I find completely uncontroversial. They did, of course, slip pay-to-play into that list, albeit disguised as

Examining the different membership participation options, with a short term "event pass" for new participants.

But at least this time they're not trying to ram that down everyone's throats as The Only Way.

The problem, of course, is that none of the listed options are going to help nearly enough -- they'll raise a few thousand here and there, but they're not going to plug a tens-of-thousands hole. (And I'm pretty sure that pay-to-play is long-term suicide for the club as we know it.) So I expect the old arguments to revive.

Which does lead me to wonder: can I coherently make the argument that the only way to fix the Society's budget issues is to decentralize, in less than ten eye-glazingly dense pages? I do think it's the case -- IMO, much of our budget problem, like many of our problems, comes from the SCA's excessive degree of centralization. But it's not a simple argument to make persuasively. Time to start doing some outlining...

Comments

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

They need a new funding model - membership has failed.

Period.

[jducoeur]

While I largely agree, I think it's only half the story. The funding model flows, in large part, from the structural assumptions. So I don't think they're going to be able to find a long-term viable funding model without deeper changes to how things work...

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

Agreed.

But, at the same time, it buys time/puts off the inevitable.

[liamstliam.livejournal.com]

Justin: I have a question.

Home many kingdoms are already, in effect, pay-to-play.

I know some places you have to be a member to fight (or pay a fee) or to get an award, and then there's being an officer.

Is this an EK/Aethelmearc mindset.

I do think they are taking a different and better approach.

[jducoeur]

I do think they are taking a different and better approach.

By having more pay-to-play? I disagree quite strongly. In particular, I believe pay-to-play is the best way to send the Society into a long-term decline.

One of the Society's great strengths is that it is very *porous* -- it's easy to be kinda-in and kinda-out. This leads to a huge number of people drifting in and out over time. That works in both directions, but it does mean that people don't often Quit The Society Dammit: more commonly, they gafiate for a while and then come back. That's easy, because of the fuzzy lines.

Pretty much any form of pay-to-play draws sharper distinctions between the "ins" and "outs", and leads to more people going "out" for good, because you have to make a much more deliberate decision to return. It's a functional model for a club, but not (IMO) for *this* club: clubs that work this way generally wind up smaller, tighter-knit and more exclusive. Hence, my opinion about long-term suicide -- I believe it would send the SCA into a 30-year death-spiral of gradual shrinkage and constant financial crises.

As for the officer thing, *that* is simply unspeakably stupid. At the local level, we are constantly struggling to find officers willing to do the work. Adding additional impositions on top of that, and thus limiting the candidate pool, is just plain dumb. Whereas I find P2P for awards merely philosophically disgusting and probably long-term bad for the club, P2P for officers makes me actively angry: it's an idiotic policy, that harms local branches seriously for a *very* slight benefit to the Corporation.

As for whether this is a local mindset: hard to say, since the East is what I know best. But it's also what I care about most. And the decline in this Kingdom since the first round of P2P has been stark. Corporate may be blind to it, since *membership* has held more or less steady, but *participation* -- the number of man-hours actually spent on the SCA -- is way, way off. Without participation, we don't have a club. And I can list several ways in which that decline in participation, at least around here, is closely linked to the rise of stricter membership policies...

[liamstliam.livejournal.com]

I am sorry I was not clear.

1. I think the reaction in some/many kingdoms to pay-to-play will be different than it will be in the East, because many of those kingdoms *are* play-to-play. I was contemplating whether we are seeing things differently because of "way things are in the East."

I agree with you on other kingdoms and awards, etc., but that's the way it is. not a debate topic. I was observing.


2. And a completely separate thought, unrelated to pay-to-play, I like some of the things they have done already, I like some of the possible ideas, and I like their approach this time around. I have long felt that they would be able to make a great deal of money from having their own line of t-shirts, etc. I know a lot of folks who spend a lot of money on t-shirts, bags, etc. at Pennsic. Yes, I know that's a smal thing, but they are at least con sidering things they have never considered before.

[jducoeur]

Oh, absolutely. Like I said, the Board doing a much better job than the last time around, considering options rather than than freaking out.

And I do think most of the ideas proposed range from "fine" to "of course" -- out of the list, I only object to one or two, and some are things I've been hoping to see for years. (For instance, I've long been irked that we *don't* have outside subscriptions to TI.)

I'm just doubtful that they will help enough to make a real difference: I believe most of them will bring in only modest revenue...

[estela-dufrayse.livejournal.com]

First off, I pay my membership. I want to hold office and do things in the society that requires me to. I also hate paying the fee.

For me, it's not cheap, depending on the dollar. I have a huge issue with paying for an office in one of the most expensive markets in North America. I also, of late, have had a problem with my information going to an American address. So I am one of those who is all for decentralization. But then I have also met Renee and think she's pretty cool and wouldn't want to lose her as a resource for the society.

Being a Canadian, it really doesn't make much sense to hold a membership, it doesn't do much for me, and publications are often hit of miss in recieving. I only hold a membership to support my Barony, but I can totally understand why many here do not. It's just not affordable and not justifiable.

Throwing money at a problem doesn't make it fixed. I think we really need to look closely at how the business is run and come up with a much better game plan that works for everyone.

Why do we need an office?

[metageek.livejournal.com]

I don't think we need an office, period. We should put it all online and get a post office box.

Re: Why do we need an office?

[jducoeur]

While I can see that argument in principle, we're a ways from it in practice. Despite the development of online membership (finally), the Society is still *drowning* in paperwork, and there are probably a large number of procedures that need to be reworked before we can get away from that. And that paperwork is going to need organizing until we can do so.

I do think it's a reasonable and appropriate goal -- we should continue to push for lower-cost online solutions insofar as we can. But I suspect we need to reduce the paper trail quite a bit more before it's realistic to think about dropping an office entirely, so it's going to probably take a while to get there...

Re: Why do we need an office?

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Oh, definitely. It's not a short-term goal, but it makes a good a long-term goal because every step towards it will reduce costs.

[corwyn-ap.livejournal.com]

How about this for an argument:

1) The corporation doesn't have enough money to do everything it wants to do.
2) It should therefore cut back on what it does.
3) If the membership still wishes to have those things, they can either do them locally, or pay a fee for that service.
4) Iterate until done (left unsaid).

[dryfoo.livejournal.com]

The thing I like best about this approach is that it starts (implicitly) by listing everything the corporation does. This list should probably be made explicit in order to support any further explorations of how to solve the problem.

In fact, I guess I see two lists: What the Corporation Does, and What the Corporation Does That Anyone Needs. The difference between them would be a good place to start.

[jducoeur]

While it's not a bad approach, phrasing would be -- well, dicey. The trick here is, how do you convince the Board and Officers of the Society -- a group with a very deep ego-stake in the centralized approach and tons of practice in rationalizing it -- that their services could be dispensed with and replaced by, eg, distributed committees that mostly co-ordinate online? (And in some cases, simply not be replaced?) Moreover, that the end result would be sufficiently *better* to be worth what they will, not unreasonably, perceive as a considerable risk? I mean, they won't see this as "this is the only lifeline we can grasp to save us", but rather as "this is the scariest and most radical option we've been presented, and we *could* just try to muddle along".

That's really the hard part. Making a decently rational argument for decentralization isn't *terribly* difficult, although it requires some care to do well. Doing so well enough to convince at least some of the target audience, which is predisposed towards the centralized model and which would have to do the unquestionably hard work of moving away from it -- well, that's a real challenge of both logic and rhetoric...

[metageek.livejournal.com]

can I coherently make the argument that the only way to fix the Society's budget issues is to decentralize, in less than ten eye-glazingly dense pages?

You could write up the 10-page version, pass it to someone else for ruthless editing, then set yourself a budget and add in the details you just can't part with. I could do the editing if you want. (If you don't want, that's fine, of course. You've got access to plenty of people who know the subject better.)

[jducoeur]

Hmm. Not a bad idea. I'll have to mull that over. (Indeed, I could probably edit it myself, if I was willing to commit the time to several serious rewrites...)

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Two general suggestions to make the recommendation one the board will more likely listen to: first, suggest incremental improvements, preferably ones that jump off of things they already want to do, just guiding them more towards releasing their tight central grip. Second, don't submit it alone; if you can get a larger group of people to sign it, particularly others who have a chance of getting their attention, you'll probably make a bigger impact. If I properly read the note's hinted "some parts of the society" as meaning "those guys in the East and West who always complain about centralization", you could probably help the cause in particular with buy-in from the more middley kingdoms.

For incremental changes, it looks like they're already creepy in the way of splitting off TI, thinking about their expensive office space, and doing more things by phone and online rather than by post and in person. I think all of those things are good to encourage, though of course they're only taking baby steps so far - if the cost of travel is so high, they should be looking harder at not flying anyone around for any in-person meetings on a regular basis. If they want them to stay public, let anyone dial in and listen, or stream them on the web.

The office space is probably stuck for a while, because I'd bet they used the traditional way of negotiating lower rent: they signed a long-term contract. It's a dumb way of responding to criticism about a location, but very common.

Moving TI further and further from being an integral part of the organization is probably the most visible sign of real progress, but it's counteracted immediately if the corporation starts selling merchandise. Maybe selling that kind of product would be good for a separate body to do, and donate a portion of it to the SCA, but the less the corporation gets ahold of and builds mountains of bureacracy around the better. If we can get the Inc. down to providing legal coverage, and everything else spawned out to (semi-)external entities, we're doing great.

One interesting thing I wonder about is how much revenue they are getting from the NMS. They don't mention a drop in that, but then if there was a major drop off in non-member attendence they wouldn't want to talk about it, since it looks really bad. There are certainly fewer events held, and my vague impression is that attendence at those events is generally down, so... maybe their last stop gap revenue stream that "some parts of the SCA" said was shortsighted... has proved shortsighted by drying up.

[jducoeur]

Generally good suggestions, and food for thought. (And has just spawned a fresh post...)