[277345] in TECHWR-L
Re: STC going bankrupt
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean Brierley)
Wed Mar 5 05:01:12 2025
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From: Sean Brierley <seanb_us@yahoo.com>
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Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2025 22:09:10 -0500
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The local STC was always fine. It was only after becoming a chapter officer that I ran into the massive problem that was corporate and that ended my interest in the society.
RIP.
> On Mar 3, 2025, at 4:44 PM, Suzette Seveny <suzette.seveny@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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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