In an age when probably as many people who own telephones, are also accessing the internet, it is clear that internet access has become a part of daily life. Certainly on a population basis there are as many people who access the internet as those that access their local and state roads to drive to school, work, or to the ball game (or wherever). Despite the impressive numbers of individuals participating in internet commerce, most have less knowledge of what the internet is or how to really use all it's tools, than they do how the engine under the hood of the family buggy works.

For businesses and groups such as non-profits, churches, fraternities or any other organized mob of from three to three bazillion-jillion, the internet provides some very interesting possibilities. Specifically, communicating with members becomes cheaper, faster, and potentially more comprehensive and comprehensible by orders of magnitude.

For the sake of the club treasurer, lets take a look at just one tool that everyone knows and that everyone connected to the internet uses: email.

To see why email has been and will remain such a powerful tool, let's look at the “thing” that is email from the accountants standpoint. Let us compare shoes and pickup trucks. Yes indeed you can compare them. Our “shoes” will be printed advertising and our pick-up truck will be an email list.

Print advertising, even on the cheap, costs between $1 and $1.50 to put in the hands of each recipient. For the sake of argument, let's assume that there are 100 members of the group, each of whom is to receive your monthly newsletter. If we use the $1 figure, then we are looking at an expense of about $100. If just half of them had access to email, and would accept email delivery of your newsletter, you save $50. Internet access can be had for less than $50 a month, but let us assume that your internet expense is $50 give or take a few bucks. That would imply that with just fifty recipients of electronic versions of your newsletter, you break even. If you mail more often than once a month, or if you have more than fifty recipients, the potential savings adds up fast.

Lets do some more guesstimating. Let us assume that you have a mailing list of members numbering in the range of five hundred recipients. Let us further assume that the cost per member remains at $1 for traditional delivery. The cost to email the document remains unchanged: 50 or 5,000 email recipients cost the same for delivery. The potential savings if half the 500 have access to email is $250 less the approximate $50 for internet access, and the savings per month is now in the range of $200 per month, or $2400 per year. That is the entire budget of some volunteer groups, and a significant portion of the budget of a very large number of other small groups.

“Time compression” created by real-time internet publishing can be a tremendous asset, and permits the ability to respond quickly to requests for information, or simply “late breaking news.” The ability to post electronic newsletters means that breaking news can be available to the readers in minutes rather than days or weeks, and corrections can be posted as quickly. Email can be used to alert readers of updates, and a link included to point the recipient to the updated document.

These same techniques are available for anyone to use, including for commercial applications. Note that these tools work best when the sender is contacting established customers or recipients and most emphatically should not be used for unsolicited communications with “strangers.” That method of “marketing” is generically known as “SPAM” and reputable firms know that there is no surer way to offend a potential customer.

The key to maximizing the effectiveness of electronic “media” is to remember that at bottom, everything you normally do on the internet is a form of communication. Whether it is email, browsing a website or posting messages on a newsgroup or web log (blog), communicating information is the goal. Entertainment may be a byproduct for example, but it is not the function of the internet. We will expand on this in the next issue and discuss some specific ways to benefit from this familiar but poorly understood tool.