[quote="Michael Lauer"]In my attempts to return I found that after months of officially requesting reinstatement into the club my name had still yet to be added back into the roster. While this is trivial and I do not know the circumstances behind the delay. The point I am terribly attempting to make is we need to figure out why people are leaving and what we can do to keep those we have active and bring in new members. I am sure this has already been discussed and wont go into details here. We need to keep the initiative on this and not lose it and become totally reactive.[/quote]
Speaking as someone who is/has been a webmaster & admin person in 5 different Clubs over 11 years, it boils down to a few things. The CSA really has gone down to the bare bones when it comes to webmasters. Nick Kunz is doing his best to keep most of that part of the show alive. You use to have a Club was flush with webmasters, but many have come & go and some don't do it anymore. The systems you have around it awards, dossiers et al, all of the "perks" some are not as easy to maintain as others. I personally have not stuck my hand up to help with army websites in years due to the very consuming task of keeping Officer Dossiers up to date. I tried once at the NWC years and years ago with a small army of 20+ men and could barely keep up. Nick basically does all of the CSA, except the ANV, which Steve Kitchen does.
Another issue involved are who initially receives a request, how long it takes to get to the right person and how much time it takes that person to get to it. Speaking as someone who used to have a lot of free time to manage a lot in four or five Clubs, I no longer have that time for one really, let alone the many I did and I have no idea how I did it either. But sometimes the most basic of tasks can get lost in the shuffle, of daily life, of email inboxes, what have you.
A further issue is treatment of volunteer/admin staff and also how spread out they are. We sort of arrived in this predicament due to the poor people skills of a previous CoA, who is no longer a Club member. I don't want to start a fight about it, but a lot of folks who were good admins were basically shoved out of their spots for various reasons. We in various command levels had spent years building up a good system and finding people who would work in key spots and having to find others when the folks in those spots had issues come up. But the system wasn't broke, it needed some fine tuning, but not a overhaul. Now it has been enough time since then that a lot of those folks have moved onto other things or have become more busy in real life than they were even prior. Treatment of people does a lot when it comes to these things. Another club I know is slowly learning the hard way on what happens when you mistreat folks. If you take the time to support & build up your staff , they will work wonders for you.
The other segment of this is as volunteers decline, unless you have a real streamlined & centralized system, you have to retool things. Reducing spots that are open, getting key staff in those spots, building them up, motivating them & treating them well and presenting a helpful style of command to newcomers with key contacts can go a long way to helping an organization become better & do some of the things you cite.
