[Businessmtg] FW: ASP Business - Greeter Chair Report

[Steve Rankin]

Hi folks,

As some of you might have noticed, my note below went out a bit prematurely.
I was going to mention shares by unique members, but wasn't planning on
crunching the data to figure it out.  
So, thanks to Lynne for that!  Knowing how many actively sharing members we
have may be the most important metric.  
Being an engineer-type, I like to see hard data and the meaningful
information that can be extracted from raw data.  For example, a few years
ago when we were experiencing some interesting times, I made a spreadsheet
of greeter activity from 2006 thru 2017.  The data came from the meeting
archives and showed the number of new members each month by each greeter.
Besides showing the number of new members each month, it also showed a huge
disparity between how many new members the greeters processed.  For example,
two greeters were working diligently (28 and 43 new members each) while two
others were doing essentially nothing (0 and 1).  That was useful
information that spoke to the kinds of problems we were having at the time.

Personally, I'd love to see some of this information developed going back as
far as possible (May 2006) so that we could look at the growth/decline of
ASP membership over the years.  It's exceptionally difficult to understand
the present without understanding the past.
The server does provide the number of members subscribed to ASP at any given
time, however we don't have access to a reporting system or server logs that
would allow us to determine those numbers in the past.  I've reached out to
our host and inquired about that possibility.  

Jennifer asked what we do with these numbers.  Well, first we take the
"data" and convert it into information.  For example, the 966 member count
today is a data point, but it tells us nothing except that we have 966
members subscribed today.  For some people, big is better and bigger is even
better, so the bigger that number the better ASP must be.  However, we know
that the majority of those subscribed are not merely inactive, they don't
even read the shares.  We know that because when the List Administrator
purges the mailing list, a large majority never respond even though we send
out numerous announcements.  
For example, we purged the list in August & September 2020.  There were
3,459 members subscribed when the process started.  Only 487 members
responded to the several notices.  I could interpret that to mean that only
14.08% of ASP members read the shares.  While that was true after several
years of accumulating inactive members, it certainly wasn't true the day
after I purged everyone else.  A couple of hundred new members subscribed
during the 6 weeks of the purge that were not required to respond since
they'd just joined.  We were probably closer to 95% that day.  
It also varies with what the Greeters are doing.  If the Greeters are
encouraging new members create a new email address just for ASP, then there
is a higher likelihood that those members will not read shares because they
would have to open that new email address that they haven't been using
before.  
Another possible bump in the data curve might be when we adopted the current
web-based questionnaire for new members vs. the previous back-and-forth
email exchange with a greeter.  We know when we did that, but we don't know
what effect that had on the numbers.
In any case, if we have good data, and if we do a decent job of turning the
raw data into useable information, then we can use that information to
possibly make better decisions in the future.  Otherwise, we'd be making
guesses based on personal hunches. 
Hugs,
Steve