Our biggest challenge: Breaking through the noise
by Bob Collins, EAA Chapter 54
I would lay out each month's issue in Microsoft Publisher and then convert it to pdf and send it to the members who were adopting the newfangled way of communicating such things. For an additional $10 a year, the ones who wanted a paper copy in the mail could get one.
So, after producing an issue, I would print it out and bring it to Art Edhlund, who took it to the library and ran off copies, addressed and stamped each one and tossed it in the mail. Of course, we were using digital imagery by then so the folks who got third-generation printouts weren't getting a particularly high-quality product except in the content. Back then, people with specialization in aircraft were contributing articles - Bill Schanks and Jim Montague, primarily - that remain relevant today if you can find them in our archive.
I've been thinking about those days a lot lately as I continue to analyze the marriage of our website and newsletter, with the former becoming our dominant means of relaying information and the latter mostly serving to steer people to the former.
Some months ago, I started embedding code into the website pages to help figure out what people are reading and what sort of things they favored. What I found was startling: they weren't reading anything and they weren't favoring anything. Increasingly, our audience is people who aren't members of the chapter at all.
As for the members. Well, it turns out that electronic distribution of information is a pretty easy way to ignore it.
Let me give you some insight, for example, by way of last month's issue of The Beacon.
Now, I don't have a way of determining how many people actually open up The Beacon on their computers or phones; that's an intrusion I'm not willing to adopt. But given the number of links that are in each issue, it's really easy to guess because I can track how many people are showing up at the website to read them. If members are not clicking on From the Flight Deck, President Marlon Gunderson's excellent quarterly address to us, they're probably not opening The Beacon in the first place. And that's understandable; we all have email newsletter subscriptions in our inbox that might've seemed like a good idea at the time we subscribed, that we now just delete in a mass inbox execution every morning.
So, how many people read Marlon's article? Eight.
How many people receive The Beacon in a typical month? 106
September as a whole was a little more encouraging from a total audience perspective. One-hundred-eighty-seven people visited our website - we suspect that most were not chapter members - thanks to excellent penetration by search engines. We know this because Analyzing a Fatal Accident - a 2024 article - was one of the more popular destinations.
Young Eagles pages are consistently our most popular as people look for more information on how to get rides for their kids, get day-of updates on the status of those rides, and then download images of their kids and our pilots.
So what does this all mean? From a web editor perspective, it means a tricky balancing act between presenting a product that is geared toward chapter members and presenting a product that appeals to the visiting public. It's not an impossible task; I made a good living in the web editing business for a number of years. In many ways, the easiest audience to get are the ones you didn't actually intend to reach.
More challenging is the effect of the lack of an organizational message and voice within the chapter by virtue of not having - for whatever reason - an effective method of delivering that message outside of a regular chapter meeting with a typical attendance of about a third of chapter membership. And yet, an organizational message exists; we just haven't figured out a way to break through the noise for members to receive it.
This is not a chapter-specific issue. It's probably the biggest challenge facing any organization. We are buried under information; that's what leads to those early morning mass inbox executions.
The fallout from it, though, is enormous. We found out in this year's pancake breakfast planning that people weren't reading important information, which made it harder to attract volunteers, and hard to execute the plans that were developed. It also increased the workload of organizers, who, we have to remember, are volunteering their valuable time.
We also see small participation rates in chapter surveys designed to provide a roadmap for the future of the organization, too. The list is long and troubling.
There are so many ways for us to communicate - web, email, text, phone call - but there are very few ways for us to break through the noise of too much communication to sort through.
We didn't see any of this coming back when Art was schlepping off to the Bayport Public Library to feed nickels into the copy machine, but it may well be that his was the right idea - an actual printed copy in the mail that people will read. If we did that now, I'm guessing more people will read whatever it is chapter leaders are saying.
We're not going back to those days, of course, but the irony of everything old being new again is not lost on me.
Neither is the fact that one of the feedback suggestions following the pancake breakfast fly-in is that we should have called people on the phone to ask them to volunteer rather than sending emails.
The telephone? Printed and mailed newsletters? What's going on here?
It's the ability to stand out from the norm. Emails were effective when it wasn't common. Texts were effective when you didn't get many. Your inbox was readable when it wasn't full.
The old way of doing things is a potential solution from the unforeseen problems of the new way of doing things, but it's not really a solution, of course, because (a) we're not going back there and (b) if we did go back there - societally speaking - we'd eventually be looking for ways for messages to break through the clutter of the old ways.
In short, communicators are always looking for the next big thing, which is why TikTok and videos have had their day of influence and will eventually wane just as podcasts now are waning from overuse and are about to become the blogs of the 2020s.
Web and newsletter editors for EAA Chapters don't necessarily have the answers to any of this. There's no medium that is going to make chapter members want to be informed about their organization to the point anyway where they click a link to read what the president has to say if that's just not something they want to do.
The best we can do is to keep asking the question "why don't they?" And hope the answer breaks through the noise of information overload.
Bob Collins was EAA's web editor of the year in 2002.
