90p Admin

Now that we've collected on all the OASIS people should we turn to the 90 Minds folks and suggest a fee to bill them? I could set everyone up on MailChimp to keep things easy and send out an email that is essentially their invoice. Then they could be instructed to pay from the invoice by say January 1 or we'll remove them from Socialcast and the web site. I think we had discussed a $200 or $ 250 fee. We have roughly 26 existing members plus the trials that we voted to add. Of the existing members I suspect that 6 will not renew --- some of those like Cindy Barone have already been removed but they're still on my list. I think there are some shared expenses we should continue to consider: a. GotoWebinar - $100/mo b. Some type of online business file sharing - perhaps Drop Box for business $795/5 users or upgrade Sugarsync to business $299 (would need to compare/contrast) c. Ask90Minds - $480/yr (I think $40/mo) - this we could discuss but I tend to think leave it d. Socialcast or Yammer - should budget something for this as we will likely grow - $ 3,500/yr e. Business organization costs - $ 500 The remainder could be used for defraying costs of group events, etc. We presently have about $ 4,000 in the bank. Expect about $1,200 from Blytheco for OASIS (not received) which would give us $5,200. Add in and estimated 25 members (counting drops and adding new trials made full) at $ 250 = $6,250 We'd have roughly $ 11,450

It seems like it was $250. There was some question on the multiple member firms I think.

I say we have a big party woo hoo

Fancy crackers at the get together instead of saltines.

Paid $200 in the summer of '08. $250 is a nice number considering the above.

We don't really need to charge and we also don't have to go through and invest in these shared expenses that I outlined above. However I think we should keep investing in shared things that benefit all of us in the group - since that's the benefit of being here in the first place. For 2012 in addition to our educational initiatives I think we should throw a nicer theme onto 90minds.com - one that is more modern - and go full steam into providing content on that site. Members without an email newsletter might even be able to use the RSS feed to drive one.

Perhaps there is enough funds to create a 90minds email newsletter. Via some automatic service. Do you know of any that would pull from blog posts?

There are several. Wayne has previously commented on MailChimp as a service he prefers. It's pretty dirt cheap.

Mark look at Mailchimp. If we could create separate RSS by Wordpress category it would be great. I am using Mailchimp as my newsletter. So long as I post regularly to my blog the service takes all new posts from the prior week and creates a newsletter. It's not fancy but I've always felt regular email newsletters trump ones sent only sporadically.

We could have RSS for mas90, SageCRM, tech general. I'm assuming there is a free plug in that would pull the content by category and create mix and match RSS feeds. So a member primarily interested in CRM uses the CRM RSS for their newsletter.

@WayneSchulz What do you think of mailchimp vs. feedburner? Are they even comparable?

I use MailChimp for newsletters - I'm not sure how extensive Feedburner's email capabilities are. I know they have a way to receive alerts but I don't think they have much in the way of design or customization capabilities.