The NMRA has an explanation of the policy, which isn't new, but 8 years old.
http://www.nmra.org/sites/default/files/memberservices/three_strikes_policy_explained.pdf
Our Winnipeg Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada monthly meetings were open to the public. We got something near half of all our new applications for membership from 'drop-ins.' Some of those were eventual leaders in the Society provding a lot of energy, coheshion, and new ideas.
My membership expires tomorrow. I've already used the savings to join the Norfolk and Western Historical Society and the Pennsylvania Railroad Technical and Historical Society. Two organizations that reflect the direction I'm moving in the hobby. The NMRA seems to have overlooked that in the past few years the competetion for the hobby dollar has shifted. I can attend a craftsman show and the Amherst show for a fraction of what the National Convention costs.
charlie9 You make the benefits free to all and then call people freeloaders for taking the freebies. Other than standardization of track and wheels I regard the NMRA like some labor unions, and political parties as an unnecessary organization. Now I am going to duck down and watch it hit the fan. Charlie
You make the benefits free to all and then call people freeloaders for taking the freebies. Other than standardization of track and wheels I regard the NMRA like some labor unions, and political parties as an unnecessary organization. Now I am going to duck down and watch it hit the fan.
Charlie
No need to duck, you hit the track spike squarely on the head!
Have fun with your trains
Bureaucracy at its finest - aka organizational suicide.
I was a member of the NMRA, twice, for a total of about 18 years. Since the NMRA and I have interests which have diverged over the years I have never physically attended an NMRA-sponsored function. Nevertheless, I can see where a novice model railroader might live where attendance is easy, and wants to reduce the slope of the learning curve and/or see other people's work. It seems that this new policy is novice-hostile; "Decide NOW, or else!"
Someone should suggest a bit of re-thinking. People who give clinics or provide information should be exempt. Persons who wish to attend but not join might be asked to ante up a small surcharge on their ticket, or pay a small admission where NMRA members get in free. Also, three times in a lifetime is absurd. Three times in a calendar year I could see.
Seems to me that this policy, as-is, has the potential to be the NMRA's death rattle. I really hope that wiser heads will prevail.
Chuck (Ex-NMRA member modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
I will start with this: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. But if you provide no path to the water, the horse will surely die of thirst.
In this day and age of multiple competition for hobby time and dollars, if someone see an interesting event but then in the fine print it says sorry, members only, and the membership fee approaches the $100 range, more often than not the person will just forget it and not attend. However, when the even is open to all, and the sponsor group includes a table explaining the benefits of membership, at least some of the non-members who show up will join. Maybe not a lot, but some is better than none. Totally closing events to non-members is a sure-fire way to guarantee that replacement members for those who are aging and become no longer able to participate will not appear.
The one group I belong to is fairly open. Guest are welcome at monthly meetings. Most other public-facing things we do are a trin show we sponsor (everyone pays admission there) and setting up our modular display layout in various venues - some, like the RR Museum of PA, charge admission, we don't get a cut, but we are allowed to have our donation box and merchandise sales table). Membership if very modest, it was until recently just $25, which I've wondered for a while if is high enough to actually cover the benefits you get. Some things are member-only - we have a rather extensive archive of materials but only members are allowed to access the archives. I've always renewed my membership at one of the higher levels rather than the basic, mainly because I want to support the organization and I didn't think the basic membership covered the costs well enough.
We do offer information on both the prototype and models on our web site for anyone to see. None of the publications are free to non-members though. We don't have a model reference publication though like some groups, just a monthly meeting newsletter and the (well, we try) quarterly magazine, which is available for single issue purchase by non-members. We do have a museum opoen to the public for a modest admission, with both real and model exhibits, including locos and rolling stock in various states of preservation. Members and non members can shop our online store, or the museum store, and we usually have a sales table at all local train shows - members do get a discount on books though.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
Firstly, I am not a NMRA member. I live way too far away from any sanctioned activities to participate. 3+ hour drive for me to attend meetings or events. And the magazine and website are not worth $70 a year to me.
However, I will say this: I am a member of several other professional and hobby related groups. None of which allow non-members to attend general meetings and gatherings. I can understand where the NMRA is coming from on this. They did a cost/benefit annalysis of potential new members vs. lost income and made a choice.
I belong to three rail/model rail organizations that are experiencing similar challenges: an aging and "not growing" membership, increasing costs of operation leading to membership being costly, and a sense that members are paying their dues to obtain what others seem either to get for free or do not regard as valuable enough to them to warrant joining. Those organizations are the National Railway Historical Society, the Chicago & North Western Historical Society, and the NMRA.
I am President of our local NRHA Chapter and we welcome the public to attend our meetings which mostly are slide/digital image shows. Why? We like to have a large audience for our excellent presenters. Persons can and do subscribe to our monthly newsletter without having to be dues paying members, because it has local rail information that they like. But the NRHS has made it clear that local Chapters may be providing so much value to non members that it is costing the NRHS dues paying membership, and I suspect they are correct. But there is very little appetite for playing hardball on the subject because right now it is not easy to point to the value of NRHS membership.
For the C&NWHS the top quality magazine it publishes for members, North Western Lines, is for sale at many hobby shops, but its online The Modeler magazine which is an excellent resource for model railroaders of any prototype interest, is available free on the C&NW Historical Society's website (check it out sometime). C&NWHS leadership is starting to question whether it should be free.
And many if not most NMRA Divisions I know of have long opened some or all of their meetings to the public (quite apart from train shows which are intended to introduce the hobby to the public) as part of their own outreach and educational function that makes them 501(c)(3) organizations.
That will presumably soon be changing.
The NMRA has for some years had a policy that said you need to be a member to take advantage of NMRA activities and services. Makes sense, except that meetings with clinics or little swap meets have typically not been viewed as that kind of activity or service that needs membership. Now the NMRA has articulated its position very clearly and is using a bit of a big stick to enforce it -- the denial of liability insurance coverage to NMRA divisions or regions that disobey the directive. Here is a portion of how the policy is newly articulated by the NMRA leadership:
Visitors are allowed three visits to an NMRA meeting IN THEIR LIFETIME. If they don’t join by their third visit, they cannot attend any more meetings. A lot of the questions we’ve been getting are from members trying to over-think the policy, worrying about this or that exception and making up complicated what‐ifs. The policy does not apply to members’ spouses who come along to the meetings so that they can go to dinner fterwards. It does not apply to non-member caregivers who aren’t modelers, but who provide a ride to a member who cannot drive himself. It does not apply to events that are organized for the general public, like mall shows, swap meets, beginner clinic series, and the like, nor does it apply to things like joint meetings with another non-NMRA group or to family picnics or outings.
This has been causing a fair amount of difficulty if not angst for some in the NMRA. While it is recognized that there are many freeloaders who openly state they can see no reason to join the NMRA when they can attend for free the only aspect of the organization that interests them -- meetings, clinics, bus trips -- it is also thought that without those non members there might not be enough of a critical mass to even hold those events. It is also thought that it might legitimately take more than three visits in a lifetime to NMRA events to see the value of membership, particularly if the clinics are (as they sometimes can be) "dogs." Or if you used up your 3 precious visits when you were a kid (and we do everything we can to get kids to come to our meetings) and now you are an adult, maybe even retired, revisiting the hobby.
Some have even gone so far as to predict that this new and rigid articulation of the policy represents the NMRA in a death spiral because the response won't be to join, it will be to not attend. That might be melodramatic, but I would agree in general that it is quite obvious from the vast majority of model railroaders who are NOT members of the NMRA that the virtues of membership are not, shall we say, self evident, even to very serious and busy modelers. Many years ago Hal Carstens went so far as to say that the real need for the NMRA was when scale model railroading was very very difficult, and that need ended when scale model railroading became easy. So it is not a need but a -- what? A luxury?
And some NMRA leadership has been ambiguous about whether even those who GIVE clinics to NMRA groups have to pass the three strikes or you're out standard. At least one NMRA functionary says they do. Our local NMRA Division has had many clinics by a guy who works for the FRA, about how to reflect FRA rules and standards in our model railroads. Invaluable information - and are we in a position to dictate to the guy that he pony up for NMRA membership so he can continue to do this great favor of giving us these (free - he is not paid) clinics? We have also been told that our layout tours should not include the homes of non-NMRA members. That puts us in the awkward position of dictating terms to someone who thinks, correctly, that they are doing US the favor, not the other way around. Some of our tours have been to superb tinplate layouts. For what reason would or should they join the NMRA, which does not even want them as members?
My own opinion is that the NMRA leadership should be concentrating on reasons for people to WANT to join, not looking for available leverage to try to force people to join. But then this is not the only area where my thinking differs sharply from current NMRA leadership.
To quote the current NMRA President, those are my thoughts. What are yours? The difference is, I am actually interested in learning your thoughts ....
Dave Nelson (NMRA member since 1981)