by I appreciate the confidence the membership has shown in my abilities by electing me twice for the LOPSA Board of Directors. I hope they will continue to support my run for a third term.
With nearly 25 years of experience as a systems administrator, network administrator, webmaster and sometimes developer, I feel I have a good grasp on the needs of our community. I formerly also served on the board of another non-profit for nearly 15 years, and I feel I can bring my experience there to the LOPSA Board.
As Membership Chair I have started several efforts to grow and retain membership:
- Worked with the treasurer to move us to a PayPal Pro account, which allowed us to enable auto-renew as a membership option
- Started a process of contacting all expired members from the prior quarter to remind them to renew. This has resulted in a significant number of renewals wevery quarter.
- Developed a survey to send with the above e-mail to find out why members are not renewing
- Started a project to expand our benefits to give sysadmins more reasons to join. There will be an announcement about the progress of this project in the next few days, if it hasn't already gone out by the time you read this.
While the membership has not been growing as fast as I would like, and membership retention is much lower than it should be; we have been growing under my term on the board. If re-elected, I would like to be able to continue to work on membership growth in the future.
I have also been working with the tech team in supporting our infrastructure, primarily as the one supporting our membership management software.
In the upcoming year, I see the following as our biggest challenges:
- Volunteers: As an all-volunteer organization we need the help of our members. As a Board we need to develop a better way of tracking our needs, communicating to the membership what those needs are, and then finding and matching volunteers to those needs.
- Membership: LOPSA needs to grow. I see this as two-fold — as mentioned above, we need to do a btter job of retaining the membership we have; and we need to find new ways to market ourselves to grow our membership.
- Adding membership benefits: The only way LOPSA can grow as an organiation is to provide more benefits to our members. The Board needs to work with the membership to find out what benefits they want from the organization and to find ways to provide new and innovative benefits that they don't even know they need.
Over the past two years the Board has made huge strides in growing the organization, but we are nowhere near reaching LOPSA's full potential. I would like to be a part of continuing this work and I hope you will show your confidence in me by electing me for another term on the Board.
If you have questions, ideas, or would just like to chat, feel free to contact me at drich@lopsa.org or you can find me on IRC as drich.