[Ethan Tapper]

I see it now, Donn. Thanks for that. Good looking horses, too.

[Ethan Tapper]

All those suggestions sound good.

Are spacers a good idea/not a good idea with these big boys? The woman I work for uses spacers all the time and I can’t tell if its helping the problem or making it worse.

What specifically am I looking for when adjusting the offset on the lines? Is there a rule of thumb or should I just see what feels right.

Donn, that drop ring idea sounds interesting. How do I see those pictures?

Thanks for taking the time, Ethan

[Ethan Tapper]

Still can’t. This is what it says:

Ethan Tapper, you do not have permission to access this page. This could be due to one of several reasons:

Your user account may not have sufficient privileges to access this page. Are you trying to edit someone else’s post, access administrative features or some other privileged system?
If you are trying to post, the administrator may have disabled your account, or it may be awaiting activation.

[Ethan Tapper]

For some reason it tells me I don’t have access to the front page.. Am I the only one who that’s happening too? I hope its not happening to members

[Ethan Tapper]

If that’s doable, I think that would be the best idea.

[Ethan Tapper]

I guess another discussion we could have are if those SFI regs are stringent enough. Forest Ethics claims that many harvests violating state harvesting laws were and are certified by SFI…

[Ethan Tapper]

I’m on board with that, as long as we can make an effort to contact people to let them know when their membership is up or about to be up. We could do this by email or by mail-mail, with the former probably being the easier. I think that maybe we should set that date later, though, because then you could have people that get a 18-month membership and others with a 6-month at the same cost.

Is there anyway that we can set the website to send out a confirmation email when you get a membership that says thanks and tells you when your membership is up?

[Ethan Tapper]

Changed! Sorry, I don’t know why you can’t edit it…

[Ethan Tapper]

I really think that we need to have a given person’s membership extend a year from whenever they bought it. Otherwise, the people who got memberships at the wrong time would have to re-pay their dues right away to get the benefits that we do have to offer members…And that doesn’t seem fair.

Can we have a “running” system that has an individual start and end date for each membership? If we did we could also send people notifications about when their membership expires and remind them to repay their dues. I know some people that don’t know if they are currently a member or not, and I don’t think anybody wants to pay them twice if they don’t have to.

To get at what Erika said up there, I think that dues could be a big part of our income, if people paid them. I think that the confusion around when they begin an end, lack of connection between the forum and the organization are the main culprits of this. I think if we put ourselves “out there” at our events and on the forum website clearly and push memberships, people will get them.

[Ethan Tapper]

That guy’s name is Tom Wessels, Tom.

Back to the greenwashing, it’s interesting to see both sides of it. As we discussed in one of the threads, SFI had their conference in Burlington and that group, Forest Ethics, organized against them. In the wake of that action I’ve seen a lot of smart young people that have been really misinformed by Forest Ethics and groups like them. These are people who are forming opinions about forestry and logging thinking that SFI is some kind of logging group that wants to clearcut all the forests in Vermont. Someone wrote almost exactly that in the UVM newspaper, and I know more students read it and now think that’s the way it is.

I went to a Forest Ethics meeting and it was hard to stay focused because noone in the room had any idea of the realities of forestry or timber harvesting. I argued with a presenter who said that no wood should be cut, ever, for any reason. Maybe in a world with unlimited free resources that would be a good thing for our forests, but now I think the discussion we need to have is how to manage our use, how to increase the output of consciously harvested material to become a bigger part of the timber resource flow. I think what they’re saying is probably true, I just think they have credibility issues.

I think Mitch said it…I can’t take these people seriously because they don’t know what they’re talking about as well as they think they do. I think that passion is a valuable thing, I just wish they would turn it into a credible, well researched campaign.

Unfortunately, these are the people and the ideas that make real decisions about our woodlands, like the Bert’s Bees lady. They want to do the right thing for the woods, they just don’t get the big picture. It’s our job to tell them about it.

[Ethan Tapper]

Here’s what I drafted for the possible front page of the forum… Let me know what you think. Its in a google doc, and you should be able to edit it if you want to. Here is the link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v6D1-7jyuOG0mn0kNdMmxCMd7hHLNxm_OupFvyXhVhg/edit?hl=en_US

Let me know if you can’t access/edit this.
Ethan

[Ethan Tapper]

One way to increase awareness might be to utilize the “front page” on the forum (I’ve been thinking we could do more with that), to tell who we are, what we do, and inform people of the fact that we are an organization that relies on memberships. People will see that message every time they open up the forum and I think it might convince them. If that’s something we’re interested in I could write something up and we could add pictures and make that area really nice.

Again, I think we need to represent ourselves in a more clear way… At NEAPFD even I don’t know that it was clear that there was an non-profit organization, called DAPnet, that was putting the event on (for those people who didn’t already know). I really think we should have an image that represents the organization and think about the other ways we can put ourselves out there in a clear way. I think that if people know who we are and what we’re doing they’ll become members.

If the image is something people are interested in I know two people who are graphic designers and might be able to put something together as a donation.

[Ethan Tapper]

@dominiquer60 29337 wrote:

If we are going to endorse a persons event as an educational network, I strongly feel that they should be a member of the network.

Going back to this, I think that this is a discussion that we need to have. I don’t know that everyone at an event like Brads should have to pay admission or something, but we need to find a way to encourage people to get memberships, and to get people to take paying for a membership seriously. That might just be at events having someone in charge of collecting membership fees being kind of pushy about it, especially if there are people at the event that are active in the community/on the forum that aren’t member. Another strategy is lower costs for meals and such at these events for members. I think in the future DAPnet sponsored events could be a good way to increase our membership, if we’re proactive about it.

I wonder also how we can establish our presence at events like these as an organization, so that someone visiting will know who we are…I think some of the most important work we can do is just awareness, letting people know that there is a community out there to support them working with animal power and beyond. I don’t know what that would look like, planting our flag in the snow or whatever, but I think that its something we should think about. A lot of organizations have a concrete image that comes to signify their organization, that can go on signs, etc. I don’t know if we have that.

At the end of the day the way we fulfill our mission has a lot to do with the way we organize and represent ourselves at these events, and that has a lot to do with membership, and our ability to make people care enough to want to pay for the services we provide (and that goes back into events/services). Anyway, some stuff to think about. I’d be interested in hearing more ideas on how to increase membership and our presence at these events (the two are very related, I think).

–E

[Ethan Tapper]

It depends on what we’re talking about… What specifically is our agenda? Are we just checking in?

[Ethan Tapper]

I set my inbox to filter those notifications, but I’ll be checking in here regularly.

[Author]

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