Club Membership 2021

Hi all, hope you’re all keeping safe in these strange times.

It’s been a quiet few years for the Club….strangely coinciding with when I decided to go freelance around 2014!  After a manic few years of graft, I finally feel in a position to invest more time and energy into the Club, so that once again there can be more to it than just the existing library slowly ticking along with only a few new contributions being added every once in a while.  My changing situation is not really as a result of the pandemic, as I’ve been very fortunate this past year in terms of keeping busy.  It’s just that work’s finally getting a bit more under control, my kids aren’t time-consuming toddlers anymore, etc…..that sort of thing. 😄

So I’ve taken advantage of the Christmas break to make a few tweaks to the Club website – some of which I hope will make it a better experience for members, and some that will definitely make my life a lot easier in terms of handling the admin side of things – it was this workload that started making it harder and harder for me to keep on top of things and start new themes, meetups, etc in my spare time.  So hopefully, by making use of new digital tools that are now available, I’ll have much more time to create new content, themes…and recordings!

One of the changes I’ve made is that rather than having the pain of sorting out everyone’s membership every year, I’m now using a Stripe payment system, rather than Paypal, which provides an auto-renewing feature.  You can cancel this of course, but it just saves me a helluva lot of admin work getting ready for each new membership year and finding out who’s in and who’s out each time.

I’ve also tweaked the Legal page, added an FAQ page, switched the discussion group from LinkedIn to Slack, and generally tidied up the menu a bit to make it clearer and easier to use.  I’m also nearly finished doing some general maintenance on the collection itself – a job I’ve been meaning to do for ages – as I’ve noticed a few files have gone astray over the years due to a random Google Drive bug that I’ve now fixed.

Going forward, I also intend to look into the UCS initiative in order to improve our labelling system, which has long been a major headache for some members.  As soon as I work out how best to incorporate this, I’ll update the website so everyone can know best practice going forward.

Membership has rolled over for free these past few years while things have been on the slow burn but in order to start this new payment system properly I want to start with a clean slate of active members, so if you’d like to be involved in the Club going forward as I ramp things up again, please go to the Payment page where you can renew your membership.  I’m keeping the membership fee at £20, as it’s always been these past ten years.  

I really hope you do decide to get involved in the Club – it’d be great to see what the Club can be in this very different, much busier, landscape of crowdsourcing compared to the way it was when I first started the Club on Soundcloud back in 2010.   

Stay safe everyone 👊🏼

Best,

Michael