[Moo] SCA membership fees increase

[Shannon D. Combs-Bennett]

>From the Announcements list:


Due to extraordinary legal
expenses from an ongoing lawsuit, the SCA has determined that our best
option
is to raise membership fees in most
classes by $8.00, effective January 1, 2011. Family membership rates
will not
increase, although the family cap for memberships will be raised by
$5.00
effective the same time.

When we indicated in 2009
that membership fees would raise gradually over the next three years, we
were
not fully aware of the extent and impact of the legal fees required to
defend
our organization. Earlier this year we received a realistic projection
for
legal expenses through 2011. We are committed to protecting not only the
SCA
Inc., but the assets of every SCA group. This lawsuit may go on for
additional
years and cost-cutting alone will not be sufficient.

We are formulating a plan to
get the SCA back on track and are selecting options to restructure our
operating business model. One option is a move to electronic kingdom
newsletters with a print-on-demand option for those who would like to
get their
version in hardcopy. With these changes, there are many details to
consider

including: legal issues
surrounding the fulfillment of our current subscription liability; the
development of an electronic publishing framework for use by kingdom
chroniclers
that supports both web-publishing and print-on-demand; writing relevant
changes
to governing documents, officer handbooks, and kingdom procedures; and
making
dramatic programming changes to the SCA website and corporate systems.

The current migration of
corporate and Society officer email addresses to a more robust
infrastructure
is a step in this direction.

It is our hope that as
financial circumstances evolve we will be able to re-evaluate the entire
membership fee structure once the effectiveness of the restructured
business
model can be determined. This would include evaluating the necessity of
collecting NMS as well as potential reductions in membership fees.

There will be many stages in
this process where feedback will be needed and solicited. We want to be
completely transparent with any changes that will be made, and will
share
details as they become available. As every year, the budget will be
posted on
the SCA website as soon as it is approved for your review. Our job is to
keep
you as fully informed as possible and in that spirit we welcome any and
all
questions and comments. For the moment, please submit questions and
comments
through comments at sca.org <mailto:comments%40sca.org> .

Finally, this process will
be very difficult and take many months to complete, so please bear with
us.
During this time, Board members will be attempting to attend as many
events as
possible to be available to answer your questions.

The SCA Board of Directors

__._,_.___

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.stierbach.org/pipermail/moo-stierbach.org/attachments/20101202/520449c0/attachment-0002.htm>