[Ravensfort] membership updates stuff from corpora

[Dominique Epps]

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.

 

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
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