No, you’re lecturing people about one-side. It’s disingenuous to try and present only your perspective to people, and hide the arguments and evidence presented by anyone else.
Things like youtube videos with comments disabled are the same way; it’s designed to seem like it’s the only option, the only source without any valid, meaningful discourse.
Gotta second this; with only a couple exceptions, most of the “adversarial” nature comes from people who don’t like it when their BS gets called out. They either dig in their heels and keep arguing it, or they run off and claim that the membership is mean to them because they can’t actually defend their argument. A prime example of this is a thread for a Digital Media minutes post, which was pointed out to be extremely outrageous in almost every sense of the word. Rather than try and justify the plan, or discuss things with the membership, the chair tried to shut down discussion because he had no defense for the lavish waste of funds they authorised and didn’t want to be held accountable to the membership: 2019.10.25 - Digital Media Meeting Minutes - #39 by michaelb
(to onlookers, this is in fact one of the people running for the BoD… that tried to silence members from discussing his committees plans)
Every day we lose a number of members due to expiring cards. I spent a few hours putting this post together, and frankly I’m getting a little out of it so I’m gonna stop here and maybe tweak it tomorrow.
ah yes, the well-discredited, misleading graph with explicitly confusing axis and unrelated data, and your addition of a label “steady decline” that started well before this board and you conveniently leave off the rise leading up to COVID.
There’s no correlation in this decline with classes; there’s no correlation in this decline with revenue (on the contrary, our revenue is way up compared to the same quarter a year prior), nor does it correlate with honorarium payments. The start of that decline marks squarely with the rise in membership costs. And it’s funny, people keep saying we’re doomed right now but the numbers in the bank don’t lie: proper fiscal policies have placed us leaps and bounds over where we used to be, even with major expansion spending.
Even when choosing whether to ignore the fact that correlation != causation, these numbers completely ignore compounding factors and the actual evidence: the vast majority of cancellations (which remember, we can see what they list when cancelling directly) are related to moving, finances, and not-enough-time-to-visit and we lose a lot of members that simply have failed payments silently.
Your anecdotal, edge-case example of leaving because (and I’m quoting your cancellation here) “Bullshit board” is a far cry from the actual reasons people leave. Want to know how many cancellations have a mention of the board? In the history of our WHMCS records, going back years, the total count of cancellations that even mention the word “board” or “BOD” (excluding cases where it’s a partial match like a user moving to Cambodia) is exactly 8 (including yours). These go back years, including complaints against your buddy Kris Anderson by multiple members about their abuse of power and botching the expansion, and one where Thummel not being banned for threats of violence towards members was the core of the complaint (which we noted, he actually already had been banned when that complaint came in someone apparently misinformed that member).
A Study in Actually Useful Numbers
So Why do Members Cancel?
The majority of members cancel for reasons outside control of the space. In a sample of one year of drop data, we looked at 369 cases from 2018 of actual cancellations.
- live too far / moved: 15 + 68 = 83
- money reasons: 44
- traveling: 14
- temporary, say they will be back: 23
- project completed / bought their own tools / DMS doesn’t have the tool: 7 + 2 + 2 = 11
- unstated personal issue: 1
- health reasons: 3
- not using the space / no time / do not need the space: 93 + 60 + 6 = 159
- job issue (could be financial or time related): 12
- DMS or BOD issue / Lack of Classes / Dislike of Rules: 5 + 1 + 10 + 3 = 19
of these 369 cases, only 19 are within the control of DMS, a rate of approximately 5%.
Whilst the dataset from the current year isn’t completely aggregated into a handy spreadsheet like a volunteer did in 2019 for the 2018 dataset, being on the recipients list of every cancellation I can say with certainty they’re all in the same boat. Moving, Finances, not enough time / not using the space, etc dwarf issues related to DMS politics. The only new biggie has been COVID during Spring of 2020.
Drops due to Lack of Payment
FD: This is all back-of-the-envelope based on what I can reasonably pull from the billing system without a ton of coding custom API calls right now. It looks at cases where invoices were cancelled, and uses the number for those which were attempted to be charged but did not succeed so the account was suspended. These are undercounted by the mixing of combined add-on/primary invoices with the invoices where members are counted separately into an invoice for an add-on and a separate invoice for the primary.
This does not factor in members that rejoined at a later time; the point of this exercise is to show how common card-drops really are, and why it generally doesn’t make any damn sense to look at just membership numbers and magically, somehow, they’re caused by the current board.
The Numbers
From July 1st 2019 through February 29th, 2020 (I chose this range since the new board is established, and this ends before the COVID fears start setting in and doesn’t count the edge cases of the 2 weeks before COVID where we had a small spike and sudden cancellations based on local universities closing their makerspaces)
We had 571 members that had their invoices that entered cancelled status after being generated.
Of these, 140 were cancelled without any charge attempted. This means there were 140 cases of accounts for which they put in a cancellation request after the invoice was generated, or they removed their payment info directly (meaning the system did not attempt to charge it). These are shown in the screenshot as entries that do not have a “Last Charge Attempt” date and are deducted from this number
This makes for:
571 - 140 = 431 membership drops because of unpaid invoices (or about 75% of the drop incidents)
That right there is a sizable chunk of members, dropped during that timeframe because their payments on file did not go through.
Now how does that compare to other years? I’m glad you asked!
so in the same period the year prior (2018-2019) we had
514 - 131 = 383 drops due to lack of payment.
Signups Slowed Down
But wait, why is this year different??? that’s only a few percent difference in drop rate from lack of payment.
Excellent question. It boils down to new members coming in the door decreasing, whilst the drop rate remained largely unchanged. This can be seen in the following outputs from WHMCS (though please note, these are new members tracked in the graphs, whilst the second column of data is overall orders).
2018 signups; note the highly anomalous spike compared to prior year
2019 signups
2020 signups (of course, this is an incomplete graph due to current year)
So why did sign-ups slow down?
Well, there are a few reasons and it’s impossible to name a single one as responsible.
- higher rates of membership as set by the last board
- universities and schools now offering makerspaces in-house
- the significantly lower cost of various maker-hobbies to run at home versus at DMS (3d printing, laser cutting, etc now being affordable at home for most maker needs)
- we’re not the only makerspace in Dallas
- Probably the most overlooked: market saturation there’s only so many people in range of us that actually are interested in making things, or at least interested in making things and choose to use a shared workshop rather than procure their own tools. Countless artists in Dallas have their own studios, plenty of hobby machinists have their own mills and lathes.
Does Less Members mean DMS is in Financial Peril?!
This has a very short answer: NO
And a modest explanation:
Despite the drop in new member signups, we have had a significant increase in overall financial status compared to last year when we had quite a few more members. How? Simply put, we’re not blowing money out the window.
- Enforcement of committee spending policies
- Enacting the new financial SOP
- Not tolerating the people who steal from us
- Not blowing $30k/month on honorarium
– As a reminder, the Honorarium plan in place was made by the Committee Chairs who just had to meet a spending target. Some committees ran with accelerating things to make classes easier afterward. Some sat on their arses and moaned how “no one would ever teach” whilst shutting out willing teachers by intentionally making their class schemes convoluted and shutting out discussion from the membership.
tl;dr: we don’t allow frivilous waste like the table in the bottom of these minutes: Digital Media Committee Meeting 20191129 - Dallas Makerspace
Conclusion
The sheer statement that we somehow have a massive exodus from the space this year is 100% bolognium.
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk on what it means to have actual evidence, rather than just a bunch of BS spewn out because someone wants to be a concern troll.
and with that Goodnight, I already had to learn enough about the reporting functions in WHMCS, spent overly too long on this post, and I’m tired of dealing with this argument that somehow we’re making people leave because of some vague “this board” reasons like some would imply.
Regards,
-Jim Hartnett
Infrastructure Officer, The guy that reads every cancellation notice and knows most people leave because of moving/finances/not-enough-time.