[Businessmtg] next agenda item

[Lynne]

Hi everyone,

That closes our discussion of the alt-GR and alt-CMA positions. Thank 
you all for your thoughts. It seems there is support for the creation of 
an alt-GR position, but we need further discussion to iron out the 
details. We will bring this back to the BM in July.

Now we move to the next item on our agenda: Discussion of the reduction 
of web traffic to ASP and the affects on our membership.

As you will have noticed from my List Administrator report and 
Jennifer's Greeter Chair report, we have significantly slowed the number 
of new members joining ASP. This abrupt decline started in the fall of 
2022. We believe this coincided with a WSO website change. Prior to 
then, if you searched for Al anon electronic meeting, ASP was in some of 
the top results. Also, on the WSO website, if you used their electronic 
meeting search, ASP was also one of the top listed as it was 
alphabetical and "A Serenity Place" was right up at the top. However, 
they redesigned their search feature to include all zoom and other 
platform meetings and now when you search for an electronic meeting, 
they show the next meeting that happens in time. So if you search on a 
Wednesday at 4pm, they will show you meetings that start at 5pm that day 
and then onwards. Which means that all 24/7 meetings are harder to find. 
You have to navigate to the search pane and click on 24/7 meetings. This 
change in their website has also affected where ASP is in google search 
results as all of the top results for electronic Al anon are now WSO 
sites (and I think one is OLA-IS, which does list ASP).

The reason this matters is that we are now about 240 members. But with a 
slow trickle of newcomers and a slightly faster trickle of people 
leaving ASP, we are not on a sustainable trajectory. So while the 
recovery meeting might not be affected now, it likely will be affected 
in the future, unless we can figure out how to reverse the decline in 
new members.

What we would really like are suggestions on how we might go about this 
or any thoughts about the issue we are facing. Some thoughts from the SC 
are:

1. to try and optimize our search engine results so that we can get ASP 
higher in google listing.

2. to redesign the public site to be more user friendly and inviting 
(although this doesn't help if we don't get eyeballs on the sight).

I am probably forgetting some others (Steve, Anne, Jennifer, please help 
fill in anything I missed).

We will be discussing this for the rest of the BM, until April 30th. 
FYI, Linda had requested the agenda item regarding archives, but since 
she sadly couldn't join this BM, that topic will not be discussed this 
meeting.

Hugs,

Lynne