90p Admin

This may be brilliant or stupid. Please tell me which. Expanding upon Wayne's open enrollment support forum a bit: 1. Create the Tech Support forums. 2. Brand it as 90 Minds OASIS (open access support is swell -- or come up with your own acronym). 3. Open it to all comers - valid resellers only. 4. No charge but access requires putting up link to 90Minds.com on the member websites with approved ""badge"" (graphic) and text. (Ex. ABC Consulting is a member of 90 Minds OASIS where dozens of top Sage partners work together to lower your support costs and turn around time) (or something similar).

Revised point 4. There could also be a fee for access as well. I'm not opposed to that but I think it will shy a lot of folks away which is the opposite goal of a broad open membership. (As opposed to 90 minds where I think we should have a fee to support joint activities and keep time-wasters at bay)

The technical area is the single most important area of 90 Minds in my eyes --- unless you can point out another project that has jointly been worked on with the same activity level. When I mentioned getting together again for joint training while at Summit I thought I was going to be roped and burned at the stake. I have reservations about taking all comers and giving them any type of designation / logo. My original thought was just run a separate tech area so we could cherry pick the active folks and recruit them over time as full 90 Minds members. The thought on charging evolved over multiple discussions and I think charging is a low level type of screen (if someone is not going to get $250 of value per year from participation then we probably shouldn't have them in the group at all).

Ay-yi-yi... weren't you the one proposing an all-comers tech support group?

Yes - though I think we should just make it a fee based and not give the people any indication that they are 90 Minds members or display any type of logo (which I think should be a 90 Minds full member benefit). Strictly a sharing group where they would interact with present 90 Minds members. The good active ones move through the ranks. The part that scares me: a. 90/10 rule means 90 % won't do anything except create an account b. If we don't charge a fee then we won't have really any screening and we'll potentially have more lookers And, yea, I am just assuming on some of this and my thoughts have evolved as I saw the excellent work you did on the member benefits.

Let's charge a fee and move on down the road. As we have seen with our recent admissions, being part of the free group doesn't necessarily mean you are an active participant. As Wayne has stated numerous times, 90% of the new comers will not be active. If you are willing to pay a fee, you will participate. If you don't think you are getting value, you won't reup in year two. If you really want something free, then become active in the Sage Community (and keep answering Cliff's questions) Regarding the the Summit training session, I wouldn't call it getting burned at the stake, but there wasn't any concensus that a weekend in SD in October was going to benefit the group. I still think THAT is still a great idea............

Let's agree on the fee. I think it makes sense because it self-screens the tire kickers AND it will hopefully drive that 90 / 10 to be closer to 70 / 30 since there would be skin in the game to become a member. So... putting that aside, what's the risk of branding this tech support forum as 90 Minds - lite membership?

+1 the fee

Thanks everyone - in a nutshell we agreed that we'd charge an application fee. Set a goal to reach 50 active members (emphasis active) and bring on 4 people per month (goal) for 3 month trial. This is all very similar to what we're doing now but just a little more concrete. We've also decided that Socialcast is the best place to remain for now and we'll investigate the paid cost option.

I do think we should have a designation, maybe not 'member 90 minds' but maybe '90minds affiliate member' and that logo/text points to 90minds.com. No reason we should leave relevant link juice on the table.

I thought the same thing Mark. But the way I understand it now is that we are sticking with a single membership tier. The probationaries will be in a trial state for 3 months and then they will either move up to full membership or move out. So... no need for the affiliate logo with that approach. I think that the full membership though should have a badge and pre-approved text that is required as part of membership. The confidentiality agreement that we are asking people to sign should spell this out and the fact that - if someone drops from the group, they are to immediately take it off their website.

@MarkChinsky @PeterWolf Since we'll be reviewing these folks for a three month period seems that we should hold off on the logo -- though I agree members should all provide the logo on their site which links to 90 Mind.