Category for Affiliated Societies

[Kathy-WPalmBeach]

I have never heard of Societies limiting the number of "free" meetings a visitor can attend. In S Florida this doesn't seem to be a problem.

[Kentucky]

I never heard of it either. We have a fantastic rate of visitor to member conversions. Most join during their first visit. I know of no situation where a visitor abused the liberal visitation privilege.

???

[epiphyte]

Two things...

First thing....not sure about other parts of the country but here in Los Angeles, the Farm and Garden section on Craigslist is becoming quite popular. A few months ago I wrote an article on how orchid society members can utilize Craigslist to help promote their society...

Craigslist for Orchid Societies

Second thing...Group Purchase Opportunities (GPOs) add great value for orchid society members but it doesn't seem like that many societies regularly offer GPOs for their members. Well...or maybe they do but they just don't publicize the opportunities on the orchid forums. Here is a GPO page that I just put together to help automate the consolidation of participants' orders for my society's current GPO...

Floralia Group Purchase

The details of this GPO can be found on the flickr group for orchid hobbyists in Southern California.

[epiphyte]

Shortly after joining my society, a long time member and myself were discussing methods of promoting the society when I brought up the idea of encouraging members to write articles to upload to the society website. He literally laughed. He said the problem was that most members weren't knowledgeable enough to write articles. Figured it wouldn't hurt to ask anyways...so I e-mailed all our members and encouraged them to write an article on any orchid related topic. As I expected, nobody submitted an article...which seemed to lend credence to my friend's observation.

One possible explanation is that you really can't become sufficiently knowledgeable about orchids by solely relying on one presentation per month. Not sure how many people borrow orchid books from our library but, as I mentioned in one of my posts above, it's been 12 years since anybody has requested access to our collection of AOS magazines.

Perhaps reading articles is strongly correlated with writing articles. So here's what I'm wondering...what is the AOS's official stance on photocopying one AOS article / month and handing out the copies to society members? Does this fall under the fair use, educational and non commercial purposes concept? I'm guessing it does but wanted to verify it in case anybody on my society's board objected to the idea on the grounds of copyright infringement.

[epiphyte]

I just e-mailed this to the SoCal orchid societies...

Hi Folks,

This last Saturday morning I managed to drag myself out of bed earlier than usual to attend Armstrong's free class on basic orchid care. Nearly 40 people showed up...which is a lot more people than I expected...and perhaps more people than Armstrong expected as they ran out of chairs. I arrived a little earlier and asked the staff member in charge of the class if it was alright if I handed out a few publicity postcards...which he had no problem with.

The class covered the basics...repotting, dividing (Cymbidiums), increasing humidity, watering, fertilizing, light, pests and cutting old spikes. Here's a photo that I took of the class...



Please feel free to download the large sized version to share in your newsletters...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/epiphyt...07332/sizes/o/

In my opinion it would be great publicity if one or two experts from our societies approached local nurseries and offered to teach a class on orchid basics. Of course, a significant motivation for Armstrong is to push their orchid related products...so when pitching the idea to your favorite garden center you'd probably want to mention something about using their products (pots, bark, fertilizer, bug spray, snail bait, etc.) in your demonstrations.

Cheers,
Carlos

[epiphyte]

There's quite a bit of dynamic content that you can easily add to your society's website. You can actually create an almost fully functional society website just by using badges. In order to provide some working examples of badges in action I put together the following page...

How to Create a Webpage for Your Orchid Society