From the Editor: BGN Switching to Donation Model, Asking for Your Support
In November 2009, I announced an increase in the Boardgame News membership rate from $25 annually to $50, with all current members being able to renew indefinitely at the lower rate. The $5 per month rate would jump to $25/month to balance the work involved with all the folks who signed up for only a single month to check out BGN’s gargantuan Spiel preview. The planned date for the increase was January 1, 2010, and when that date rolled around…
...nothing changed on the BGN registration page. I was suffering from some kind of puffy-hand virus at the time, and typing was excruciating, so I was staying away from the computer. My brain still sputtered like mad, however, so I spent time thinking about what I want to do with the site in terms of its looks and functionality and future.
Along the same lines, in late January 2010, I posted a reader survey to take suggestions on the changes you wanted to see (or not see), and I was intrigued to discover that two-thirds of the BGN members who responded – that is, those folks who did pay $25/year to check out the Nuremberg and Spiel previews – indicated that they signed up to support the site in general, not just for access to those previews. That discovery got me thinking.
While BGN membership/sponsorship has more than doubled in the nearly three years since I announced that only members could access the previews, the work involved with managing memberships, tracking expiration dates, sending out reminder notices, adding special coding, and so on had also increased. I was spending a ton of time on work that was invisible to BGN readers, time that could instead be dedicated to researching and writing material for the site. So why was I wasting time on the busy work?
This realization presented me with two options: 1. Hire someone to add coding and functionality to the software to handle much of this detail automatically, or 2. Drop the wall around the previews (and all the work associated with it) and switch to a donation model. I’ve chosen the latter course, which means that all of the Spiel and Nuremberg previews on Boardgame News are now accessible to everyone. If you weren’t previously a BGN member, I encourage you to check out the Spiel 09 preview, so vast in scope that I split it in four sections to ease download time, so massive that it would print out at more than 400 pages, so valued by gamers that one BGN member had his copy stolen at Spiel! Other gaming sites offer a preview of the Spiel convention, but none are as complete as this one because I work my tailbone off to pull together as much information as I possibly can. Check it out now and get a taste of what you’ll see in the Spiel 10 preview, debuting no later than July 1, 2010.
In addition to this change, I’ve overhauled the layout and look of the site, and while some of the changes are obvious – the disappearance of the blue wrap, the reorganization of the site’s categories – other differences are of equal importance, yet largely invisible. I’ve generally stopped using the BGN watermark, employing it now only for candid shots, and not adding that mark saves a huge amount of time. What’s more, I’ve stopped saving the 120 pixel sized thumbnail images that used to decorate most of the posts on BGN, instead using the 200 pixel images that I was already saving. Cutting out one-third of the image handling process is another clear time-saver that doesn’t harm the functionality of the site. Far from it, in fact, as I much prefer the larger images. Now everyone can more easily identify the games being discussed!
My adoption of the donation model naturally means that I will ask you – whether gamer, designer or publisher – to 
if you appreciate the material covered on Boardgame News. Donations = time to write, after all, and ideally my work would consist of nothing more than researching and writing about the games you want covered. As a result, I’m going to be a bit more in your face with donation requests than in the past.
So what does this change mean for current BGN members? They have access to all the material that they originally paid to see, so in a sense they’re still getting the value of their membership. I’m also keeping a file of their original expiration dates so that if I ever switch back to the “premium content” model – and I might should this model prove unworkable – then they will receive the balance of their membership at that time.
With the elimination of the membership model, I’m also removing the semi-regular game giveaway that was a member benefit. I’m clearly unsuited for such things as it takes me far longer than it should to process the giveaways and ship out the games. (I intend to announce the winners of the last giveaway this week in order to finally clear the deck.)
My strength is in research and writing, and that’s what I should focus on doing. Everything else is a distraction from providing you the material you want to see on Boardgame News. I’ve felt great the past couple of weeks and have posted a huge number of news items and game announcements – not to mention working with game designers to publish diaries detailing The Brink of War, Valdora, Wampum and Jerusalem – and the more that you donate, the more that you’ll see posted in the weeks and months to come.
Posted by W. Eric Martin on Mar 22, 2010 at 07:00 AM in From the Editor / 204
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