yes to both Cindy Donnell
The current way of supporting Vocalist.org, through voluntary contributions, involves people putting a small amount ($10, 5 pounds, your current currency) in an envelope (yes, cash), folding it up with a piece of paper on which you scribble a loving note to Marko or enclose a postcard for his collection, and send it off to him. His bank does not charge him very much to show up with a handful of different currencies and convert them into Finnish money when he deposits it in the Vocalist account, and the amounts are not large enough to warrent serious worry about mail theft (my own mailings have never been lost, at least). We explored a bunch of options, and sending cash was the easiest way in terms of avoiding huge conversion/wiring bank fees. So cash is how it works now, without a problem.
We could go back to that old system -- in which Marko sends out yearly or half-yearly "pledge break" emails to the vocalisters, asking for contributions to support the costs -- however, I get the impression that, although most people have good intentions, only a small fraction of the community actually sends anything. Thus, Marko ends up paying hundreds of dollars in costs every year.
What if the process for getting your subscription activated simply included sending *anything* to Marko -- either a $5 or whatever your native banknote, or a note saying "I'm a student/ I'm a minor/ I can't manage the fee right now but would very much like to be a part of the list"? Those who could pay without hardship would, and those who couldn't would not be discriminated against (and it would be private, either way). Upon receipt of anything, one's subscription would go through -- but the process of getting people to put something in the mail would surely boost the percentage of financial supporters.
The purpose of a donation is NOT to chase students and struggling singers off the list, but to provide a more concrete opportunity for the majority of listers to donate, those to whom $5 a year is not a problem but who never manage to get out a purely voluntary contribution when the old system is in place. If the requirement for subscribing was simply "put something in an envelope and send it to Finland," is that a better solution?
Again, I'm not sure if Marko is up for this amount of work -- it means more mail for him, which he opens and then he manually subscribes the sender to the list.
However, egroups is getting more annoying by the day (notice these lovely ads on top), and other "free" commercial sites are just as bad. At the very least, let's go back to the old way and get the list going again, with perhaps more frequent pleadings for contributions. Are we agreed on that point?
Everybody give a vote -- yes or no, move back to the vocalist.org list; and then yes or no, have a mailing process for subscribing.
Isabelle B.
===== Isabelle Bracamonte San Francisco, CA ibracamonte@yahoo.com
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