[277343] in TECHWR-L
Re: STC going bankrupt
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Suzette Seveny)
Mon Mar 3 16:45:08 2025
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From: Suzette Seveny <suzette.seveny@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2025 16:44:15 -0500
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To: Lin Laurie <linlaurie1@hotmail.com>
Cc: TECHWR-L <techwr-l@techwr-l.com>
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Lin raises some excellent points on the causes of failure.
I can compare it to another organization I've been a part of -
Toastmasters. Even though COVID hit their membership base hard, they were
able to pivot quickly and negotiate a deal with Zoom for their clubs.
Outreach IS important. Toastmasters go out to the Chamber of Commerce, Job
Skills, conferences, and individual businesses, etc. to talk about the
value of communication skills in every aspect of your business, career and
personal life. Toastmasters International also provides a treasure trove of
marketing materials - that is regularly sent out to prospective members and
companies. They adapted their education program (3 times since I've been a
member) to take advantage of technology and evolving trends.
I never found the STC to be that "agile". The last year I was a member,
there was a problem with my membership number, and I was unable to log in.
They solved the problem by giving me a different membership number, which I
thought demonstrated their inability to properly address the problem.
As a potential hiring manager, I found it difficult to access the job board
when I had a position to fill, and it was after that year I decided not to
renew.
On Sun, Feb 2, 2025 at 5:32 PM Lin Laurie <linlaurie1@hotmail.com> wrote:
> I think it started going downhill before that. When we had the crash that
> occurred in 2008, business has stopped paying for STC membership. At the
> same time STC national had a big loss in terms of their investments and
> they made the chapters make up that money.
>
> I never did understand why our chapters were responsible to make up the
> fund difference and pay for their losses.
>
> After that, companies never started paying for membership in STC again
> like they used to. That’s why Membership numbers never rose to their former
> height. Individual members who felt like they got value from STC would pay
> on their own. When I moved back to Seattle in 2016, I started doing a lot
> of outreach by going to companies at lunches and talking about the value of
> STC and while managers saw enough value to let me come in and talk to their
> employees, they still didn’t see enough value to pay for memberships.
>
> Now I’m not teaching any longer, but I do go into classes at the
> university of Washington and speak every quarter to the latest Technical
> writing certificate program about the value of STC. I guess I won’t be
> doing that any longer but outreach was one of the things I found really
> important in order to keep STC alive in Washington state. Yet it wasn’t
> something the national organization ever discussed with chapter members,
> didn’t give us any sort of assistance, Templates for material, or other
> things that might’ve made it easier for us to do that. That was just
> something I felt was important and did on my own.
>
> No offense, but I think it’s ridiculous to try to blame everything on AI.
>
> AI wasn’t in the picture at the time of the beginning of their decline.
>
> I think that in addition to declining membership, some of the management
> and I really don’t blame it on the existing board, more it’s the paid
> people, did not manage the business end of it well and didn’t keep up with
> the times. I personally check the tools that I use at least every year to
> see if there are better tools that are cheaper and faster to use than the
> ones that I’m currently using for things like Web sites, training, meeting,
> hosting, etc. The national organization cannot deliver a purchase class
> within a day. It takes them 48 hours to give you a link to a class that you
> purchase online. I used to sell my classes online, but I don’t have any at
> the minute, but even 235 years ago, I could deliver a package class in
> seconds.
>
> They’ve talked for years about getting Zoom licensing for all the
> chapters, and yet they’ve never managed to do it if they collected a
> reduced fee from all the chapters for our Zoom sessions, they would’ve
> probably made money from doing that and save the chapters money.
>
> There’s a lot of other things that they’ve thought about doing or could’ve
> thought about doing that would have changed the money that they spend and
> made it so that they are not in debt and going out of business now, but
> they never ask for suggestions, and they just seem to keep doing the same
> things over and over and over again without any thoughts for how to make it
> better different faster cheaper.
>
> That’s what I call business mismanagement.
>
> They keep making us fill out the same template when we turn in our funding
> even though it doesn’t even fit the things we spend money on every year.
> But no one wants to fix it. I could go on and on and on.
>
> But it’s over, we don’t have to use that template anymore, hallelujah.
>
> But stop blaming AI for everything. The thing you can blame AI on is not
> delving into understanding how you can use it to do your job better faster
> differently. You can choose to be victimized by your belief in it, ruining
> the planet, or you can choose to work with it, manage how much energy is
> used to generate AI products, and find ways to harness it to do good.
>
> If you think you lose your job to AI, then go find one where you can use
> AI in your job and master it. I usually find there are two types of people
> in this world, and one type will blame something for causing the
> destruction of the planet,, like AI caused my divorce, AI killed my dog, AI
> caused the LA fires, etc.
>
> And then there are those that ask how can I harness AI for good? How can I
> use it to make my job easier so I can focus on the things I like doing and
> use it to make the things I don’t like doing automated? What education do I
> need in order to be able to work with it in a way that’s easy for me? Do I
> need to become a machine language expert in other order to work with AI?
>
> I think you get the idea. So go out and pick the side of AI you want to be
> on and then act accordingly.
>
> One more thing, the Society for Technical Communication, Puget Sound
> chapter had at least four chapter meetings in 2024 on the topic of AI. I
> don’t know what other chapters did but I certainly know that the topic of
> AI was discussed many times for free in many other organizations so for
> people who wanted to get up to speed on AI There are lots of things to do
> to get familiar with it without spending money.
>
> One of the programs I’ve been taking is at Harvard and it’s free until you
> want your certificates and then the certificates cost between two and $500
> depending on what kind of Special they’re running when you registered. So
> you have to get a double certificate one is in computer science and the
> other one is in AI, but that will cost you $1000 on the worst case and
> maybe $500 on the best case to get certified in those two subject matters.
> And it takes about 6 to 8 months depending on the speed that you want to do
> it in.
>
> LinkedIn has a very short certification on AI that can get you started and
> it’s very simple and it’s about four hours the last time I looked. It’s
> another place to start, but it’s not going to get you a job in AI
> engineering but you probably wouldn’t want that type of job anyway.
>
> Good luck!
>
> Lin
>
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> > On Jan 31, 2025, at 11:54 AM, Robert Lauriston <robert@lauriston.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > The decline of the STC had nothing to do with AI. It has been going
> > downhill for 25 years.
> >
> > For example, reported revenues dropped from $2.96 million in 2010 to $1.7
> > million in 2018.
> >
> >> On Thu, Jan 30, 2025 at 9:56 PM <e.dickinson@gmx.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> It seems that quite a number of people agree around here that STC at one
> >> time did suppport them well.
> >> That with changing technologies in TC the STC did not appear to keep up.
> >> People also name AI as one issue/threat. ...
> >>
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