Conversation didnt start this way, but it went here, so Ill put my thoughts out there, and people will undoubtedly tell me how wrong I am. But its how I learn, and I trust my friends to be honest, if a bit brusque, so its completely cool. Please engage. I honestly want to know what you think. The cost for an ECS membership isnt the $35 bucks (or $40 bucks, or whatever we charge now...) that gets you a scarf, a shirt, a song card, and a membership card. The cost for an ECS membership is your passion, your effort, and your time. We sell a lot of memberships...the ones where we hand out scarves and shirts. And, dont get me wrong, those are pretty important. They fund our activities, they fund tifo, and they give us the ability to throw events and the like. But truthfully, the real currency we deal in is passion, and the willingness to do things for the club and ourselves simply because we care. The amount of those memberships we have isnt growing all that fast...and, as many people have pointed out, is probably decreasing. What is certain, however, is that the ratio of memberships bought with passion to the ones bought with cash is dropping badly. Thats a challenge. Memberships bought with cash are transient. That is, a lot of em dont renew. They bought in to help subsidize our tifo. They like what we do and want to contribute how they can. They like the look of the scarf. Whatever it is, those people dont always pay with passion. Sure, they love the club, and theyre supporting the way they do WHICH IS FINE, but they arent spending hours of their match day handing out song cards. Theyre not spending weekends organizing and folding tifo. Theyre not spending hour after hour pressing pins. Theyre not on the stand leading chants. In short, theyre offering cash instead of time. Less and less of them are putting in the time to make us better. Louder. More organized. Some never will. And thats fine. Show up, face the pitch, follow the capo, and sing. If youre doing that, thats payment, too. That works. But people confuse the cash for showing up, facing the pitch, following the capo, and singing. The scarf doesnt make you ECS. The passion does. I dont know how to get that message out better than we have been. Perhaps we lost critical mass. Perhaps the ratio of scarfs to passion fell to a point where we can no longer be effective in helping people along the way. Maybe all we could reasonably expect was a fixed number of die-hard supporters, and as we grew, necessarily, we picked up many more casual supporters. I keep hearing that we need to educate. I strongly believe that. I just dont know how. Weve tried emails and websites, buying people beers, buddy systems, empowering subgroups, grabbing people by the shoulders and saying face the pitch, follow the capo, and sing! But were churning those casual supporters faster than ever. And were not converting enough into those who pay in passion. Were not doomed. Far from it. The section looks great, sounds great. Our support is strong, we travel well. But we could do so much better. Jon Danforth pointed out that our songs arent spreading like they should. We have no new stadium wide chants in years. Hes right. Some progress is needed...but HOW? With literally thousands of members, how do we organize to concentrate our focus? How do we educate at scale? I can educate a member. One at a time, person to person, I can do that. How do we educate a thousand? These are all honest questions. Im trying to find out how we scale effectively. Thanks for reading that far. Honestly would love some feedback.
Posted on: Wed, 28 May 2014 04:42:48 +0000
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