Am curious to which our membership would prefer: receive your Sidecarist magazine via snail mail knowing it can take up to 5 weeks to be delivered or have it sent to your email account the first week of the month?
To give you an understanding of how the process works, I'll use some approximate dates. The next issue of The Sidecarist, March-April issue will be put together on this schedule:
1). By 15th of February, the editor must have all the content, articles, photographs, etc. in hand.
2). By the 20th, he will complete assembling the draft layout and send back for review/proofing
3). By the 24th, any changes or edits will be done, the draft is then sent to the printer for final print draft.
4). By the 26th, the print draft is sent out for approval before printing.
5). With all approvals back, magazine is placed on the schedule for printing, binding and labeling.
6). By March 5th, bundles are dropped off at Post Office.
7). You should receive the magazine in your mailbox between March 8th and the 28th or later, that depends on USPS delivery to your zip code. In talks with the printer and others, we do not expect the Postal service to improve their delivery times.
8). If you want the Sidecarist as an e-magazine sent to you as a pdf file, you could have it the first couple of days of March.
We are not currently emailing the magazine to anyone, but that could be done if enough members wanted their Sidecarist via email. It does not justify the extra work to email it to only a half dozen members.
What do you think?
Please respond to the attached poll and make your opinion known below.
Ultimately this would be a decision the USCA Board would have to make.
Thank you for participating and making your wishes known. We're listening to you to make the USCA better.
Jan "CCjon" Daub
President
This raises a couple of issues.
1. It is in the Constitution that new members receive a copy of the Sidecarist.
2. We have members that do not have emails or access to the internet.
I think we have an interesting, well put together magazine, that a lot of our members really enjoy reading.
I feel that if we put this into internet form we will loose a lot of the charm and personality of the magazine.
I have no solution to the unpredictable mail but I think we should keep producing the hard copy of the Sidecarist.
Belinda
I prefer snail mail. I like to receive a real magazine to read.
Mail!
Mail for me.
The last time we ran this poll we were threatened with mass cancellations if we went digital.
A
People, please reread the original posting, nothing was said or insinuated about making The Sidecarist exclusively online. The poll is to find out how many members if any, have an interest in receiving The Sidecarist as an e-magazine via email IF that option were available.
The reality is in this day and age, more and more people are getting their news and reading materials online, computers, iPads, iPhones, etc. What we don't know is how many of those young people are now part of our membership.
It would not be impossible for some members received their magazine via USPS as they do now and others receive it via email. But one cannot justify the extra effort needed to make an e-magazine available if only a few desire it, thus the poll.
I used to be hard over in the "make mine print please" camp, but now that I'm retired and establishing a winter home down south, I find that the less physical mail I get, the better. So, if i were able to get the magazine electronically, I'd be all for it.
Ride on!!
Joe
Snail mail
I want min by mail. I share it with other people.
J.R.
Ambassador at large.
I, too spend part of the year away from home so mail is an issue. I'd welcome an email version. Could it be an option for those who don't want print?
Mark Nelson #6473
Why not both on-line and mail?
Have a link to an on-line version and let people opt-out of [or opt-in to] mail version?
Duncan
Both versions are pretty easy to accommodate from a software point of view but there is an issue with costs. The issue isn't the cost of software to develop a digital version, that's relatively cheap [depending on how much manual stuff is involved]. Part of our cost for printing and mailing is based on volume. If we convert a sizable number members to digital, our cost for printing will, at some point, go up. Does that lead to a two-tiered membership price? That's something for the Board to decide, hopefully with member input.
The elephant in the room is controlled access. We should obviously make access to The Sidecarist a "members only" thing since it's the principal benefit of membership. That means the installation of a piece of software to do that. We can control access manually now for things like access to the [now unused] Board Forum. It's not reasonable to do manually for all members and non-members. We discussed the installation of a software component that would help automate membership creation and renewal along with a couple of other things and it would provide the access control needed to make this work. That's a big project and I'm trying to get out of this job. I've been doing it for ages and I'm not going to start a big new project.
So.... Any volunteers out there who want to take over the website and work on installing and maintaining these two new software projects?
I prefer mail. I take old issues of magazines I get to my Doctors offices.
Quote from J.R. Lewis on January 30, 2022, 12:46 pmI want mine by mail. I share it with other people....
Same here. Although I personally might read it online, I prefer the option the share the print version of The Sidecarist with other people.
Lee
MB5+TW200+CRF250L+GTV300+INT650
XL883R w/Texas Ranger Sidecar
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