Raising membership cost?

DMS General
#141

I haven’t. I don’t think what’s there would really surprise any of us, and I saw all I needed to see at the last board meeting, where multiple board members were surprised that they had overdone it a bit.

And none of this should be taken as criticism.

Fact is, this is an inevitable struggle caused by succcess. The DMS is succeeding. Membership is up, the place is full of useful stuff, and there’s definitely a thing happening. But success means growing pains, and what worked at 100 members, can’t reasonably be expected to cut it at 1000. As long as the space keeps growing, it’s organization will need to keep growing with it. Frankly, I see the need to improve accounting as a good weathervane that a lot of work is paying off. But just like an especially good dump, the job’s not complete till the paperwork is finished.

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#142

The festool equipment along with some other tools were purchased with a $5K grant that wood shop received.

We do have a porter cable biscuit joiner but it should be known that they are not entirely interchangeable. A domino is a floating tenon machine and is a lot easier to use than a tenoning jig and mortising machine. That would be a better comparison. While you can use the domino in the same fashion as biscuit jointer, it would be overkill.

As for the 12" jointer we have it because wood that is 12" wide exists. I (and I hope others) look at the Makerspace to use tools they normally wouldn’t have access too.

I don’t know if we have met, but if you need help in the woodshop and I am around I am more than willing to help you decide what tool to use and why. If you haven’t taken the woodshop 101, I will be teaching one on the 16th and hope to see you there.

4 Likes
#143

Brian,

Fact is, this is an inevitable struggle caused by succcess. The DMS is succeeding. Membership is up, the place is full of useful stuff, and there’s definitely a thing happening. But success means growing pains, and what worked at 100 members, can’t reasonably be expected to cut it at 1000. As long as the space keeps growing, it’s organization will need to keep growing with it.

Excellent points and very well expressed - I completely agree.

JAG “Avengers Quote Fan” MAN

Thor: “Your work with the Tesseract is what drew Loki to it… and his allies. It is a signal to the Realm that Earth is ready for a higher form of war!”

#144

I think your missing the big picture…
What may seem excessive to you personally is not necessarily excessive to the organization. Since you brought up the woodshop I will respond with only the woodshop.

First you talk about the 12 inch Powermatic planer well I am guessing you have never had 9 inch wood on a 8 inch planer.
So than we have people coming to the BOD to purchase a 2nd planer to handle the 9 inch wood.

The other issue we have is up-time I venture that we maintain more up-time than most makerspaces around the world. While yes you can buy 1 Dewalt Biscuit joiner and when it breaks… it’s one more and then one more this is a question of buying the right tool for the job. Beyond breaking and buying now your talking about time first you wasted the time of the member that came to get a job done. The second is you are wasting the time of the volunteer that is taking time out his day to provide you with a working tool. (In this case you identified a use case that was not considered and a biscuit joiner was ordered)

If you have came to a BOD meeting you know I have a few questions I always ask.

  1. If it breaks where can I buy parts?
  2. Who do I call when it Breaks?
  3. Is this the safest option
  4. Who is the owner

When I vote to approve tools at DMS I am not looking for a 20 year tool I am generally pretty happy with 3-5 years.
So yes when you start considering people time what may sound “Expensive and Excess” I don’t think you fully have considered the amount of effort and time that go’s into making tools available to use.

3 Likes
#145

My comments here are in the context of the space running short of money. The festools are nice, like a Ferrari is nice. But if you buy a fleet of Ferraris for the school driver ed department, be careful about claiming poverty and asking for a property tax increase.

How many people at the space know the festool domino exists?
How many have used it?
How often is it used per month?

Once again, in the context of the space needing to raise dues. I am not just complaining on the wood shop forum.

#146

All of the Festools are on the wiki page and available for use without restriction. Is there a better way to disseminate that information?

Edit: This is off-topic.

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#147

“If you’re in the charity/non-profit business, you can take in as much money as you want, but you gotta have glass pockets.”

Let’s concentrate upon what it will take to reach an acceptable level of financial transparency before discussing which tools would/could/should have/not have been bought. If we do not have a clear understanding of our true revenues and expenses… we don’t know anything.

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#148

It is my understanding that a raise in fees is being considered
there have times when I have come in to the wood shop and the router table is out
ok I have one of those at home I can work around it not a show stopper.

then I come in and the drum sander has no paper, well that is a show stopper.

There are a few critical machines that are needed that attracted me to makerspace that if are not consistently available will force a decision find an alternative,

Makerspace needs to consider the value they offer to members versus other alternatives.

Alternatives such as finding a cabinet maker that will lend the same joiner, planer, and drums sander and table saw for similar monthly fee or the minimum credit card payment resulting from the purchase of those critical machines

That is what makerspace is competing with.

and dont throw back access to the cnc machine because that has largely be unavailable and there are cabinet shops that have them in the area as well.

oh and while on the subject of equipment and class fees I noticed that the Carvewright cnc machine is no longer in the shop, I was told it was given away, Okay first that machine was an object scanner even if it was not anything else. I could have taught a class on the use as a scanner and that would have been a revenue source.

it could have been sold for several hundred dollars to users in that community which may be larger than the dms community.

So in this micro instance it seems we gave away instead of selling a scanner and an opportunity for class revenue and we bought another scanning device presumably more expensive and more capable.

How many other instances are there where dms could improve the stewardship of resournces we have before compromising our value proposition to dma members

oh and btw when we fail to converse in a civil and respectful manner in the forum and replace with less than excellent communication we degrade the user member experience and the value proposition further

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#149

How has it been largely unavailable? As someone who was testing people until 1:30AM Thursday (with @wesley910, thanks Wesley! :smile:), it doesn’t feel like it’s unavailable :laughing:

It was sold in a silent auction announced on this forum. I think it sold for $500, but I could have the amount wrong.

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#150

I am for this, I’ve seen other makerspaces do this. I would probably remove my box to give the opportunity for someone else to store theirs as my car has already become project storage.

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#151

This will be long. I have been out of town at a show all weekend and I have been following the discussion on my pad. I thought about it a lot on the drive home (especially while stuck in an hour and half traffic jam in OK)

I am a fairly new member, and I get the reduced rate. I will be using an my honoraium from teaching to pay my dues and to help provide materials for my classes. My hubby is 65 and out of work and my income is totally from the sale of my art.

The folks that pay their $50 a month and that don’t come out and use the space, often are very beneficial. They are not using any of the power or cooling or contributing to the wear and tear on tools. This is the group that would be the most likely to not continue paying. These folks are a huge help. We need them!

We need to know more about how many folks are using the space and what areas they are using. I don’t understand why there is not a way to tell when a key has been used and how often. I am not a programmer, but that would seem to be a doable program for some of our computer techs.

If we could do this, then add an email once a month or once a quarter, asking those folks what they came to use.

That would give us input into the areas that attract the most folks. That would help with allocation of resources.

I have heard several folks mention the problem of expensive tools, that either are rarely used or that are hard to keep usable or that we ran into a problem with using. Now I can not verify that problem, but if it exists, then we need to look at that problem. May be make sure that more expensive items are suitable and generally useful.

The space is for having access to tools that are either expensive or that there is not room for and such. It is important to have those available, since they will attract new members. That said, if the monthly fee is too high, folks will buy a membership when they need the use of those items and not keep paying their membership dues. that is the worst of both worlds!

One of the great things about MS is the cross pollination between areas of interest. There are so many areas I want to investigate.

We do need to control spending and the membership need to understand that they can’t ask for the moon. Maybe more expensive items need to have a percentage come from donations toward. We need to get the members to look at things more like spending their OWN money.

I am wanting to explore more ways of coloring metal for jewelry. I have been impressed with the results that some have gotten from alcohol inks. Now these are expensive, $11-$12 for 3 small bottles. The ones I have, I have waited and used a coupon to get. I have been told that one can make their own, with india ink. I would love to see MS buy a full set of these inks, but before I even suggest it, I want to know that they will work for the metals we are using, and that there is not a cheaper alternative. I will work with the ones I have first, and confirm a useful need for them.

This is not a solution for bringing in a lot of money, but many colleges will have a student sale before Christmas. Any way we could consider that idea? A portion of the sales go to the college. Looking at some of the beautiful work coming from the woodshop, I know that folks would pay nice amounts, even for things that were in the Trash to Treasure show. (I am my mom’s daughter—she always asked "how can you make some money from that’—Yep, she was raised in the country, during the Depression. )

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#152

what was the thinking behind the decision to sell a machine that could work as a scanner ?

from original post/
oh and while on the subject of equipment and class fees I noticed
that the Carvewright cnc machine is no longer in the shop, I was told it
was given away, Okay first that machine was an object scanner even if
it was not anything else. I could have taught a class on the use as a
scanner and that would have been a revenue source.

it could have been sold for several hundred dollars to users in that community which may be larger than the dms community. /from original post

#153

If I had to guess, it was probably because it was sitting on a shelf for a long time and nobody was doing anything with it, including teaching others how to use it.

Here’s the original thread: Silent auction, Delta dust collector blower, Air cleaner, CarveWright

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#154

From an amazon review: “You can get this sensor attachment that goes in place of the router bit. It moves back and forth scanning a 3D image into the software. This allows you to copy existing carvings.”

I knew it was a cool tool, but alas it fell into the “untrained collecting dust tool” category and got sold. We have a $25,000 MultiCAM router and a $5000 NextEngine 3D scanner, I don’t think it was a major loss.

#157

Hey DMS Tribe,

Speaking of getting off topic, with the Open House coming up fast, perhaps it might be better to focus on the logistics of THAT for now and kind of table this topic until after the event? I seem to remember there are some excellent but still unanswered questions raised by @John_Marlow .

If we can set aside our disagreements for a few days and put on our best game face Sept. 12th, we MIGHT sign up enough members to continue building a war chest (without raising dues and blood pressures) plus make some new friends / allies in the process that will add to the fun and awesomeness of Makerspace.

JAG “Then We Can Go Back To Our Regularly Scheduled Pillow Fight” MAN

4 Likes
#158

Here is the general fund balance over this year, this may be too basic to even be useful, but it shows that in 5 out of the past 7 months we have spent/allocated more than we brought in (moving money to savings is included here as spending, since this is only looking at general fund balance)


(And yes it does seem odd that general fund increased in one month by nearly a greater amount than we brought in from dues.)

#159

I’m in on this as well as I don’t have a need for it at the moment but when I do I don’t feel comfortable taking up space without paying for it, it’s just like a locker at a gym or golf club.

1 Like
#160

too much!
Try lowering costs first

#161

I don’t understand the spreadsheet you posted.

If I take the numbers you’ve shown, I get:
Starting general fund balance: $34,013
Total dues income: $258,889
Total spending: $121,330
Ending balance: $171,572

What am I missing?

#162

You’re missing payment of rent, electricity, water, any auto-recurring monthly committee allocations.

1 Like