The ARRL is at it Again

[Michael M]

I started to write this as a response to another post, but I decided not to hijack that and instead start a separate post.

In a recent email, David Minster, CEO of the ARRL, wrote: “We know radio amateurs around the world rely on LoTW…” This is after making the decision to take LoTW servers offline during the busiest weekend of the year in amateur radio. After doing that, he then does a mass email asking people for money for a service that never required a solicitation like that in the history of the organization. Instead of begging for money, he should be driving the business and finding ways to increase revenue through membership growth.

It appears there are a lot of LoTW users who have a problem with this. Of the 160,000+ users, all that was raised was $4,000. That brought in a bit over 2 cents per user. Then there's his violation of federal law by sending UCE (unsolicited commercial emails), which can result in fines of up to $53,088 for each email sent.

My father taught me a long time ago that organizations are like fish… they both rot from the head. The data shows that while the number of licensed hams grows every year, the number of ARRL members decreases every year. If the ARRL continues on its current trajectory it will cease to exist. History is replete with organizations far larger and more successful than the ARRL having gone the way of the dinosaur. Whatever hope there is for this organization turning around dies with the current leadership, and the window for that opportunity is closing. Sadly, the culture and methodology of the current leadership is the antithesis of a successful path. It's really sad to see an organization that was once so successful and relevant to amateur radio become what it is today.

Two years ago I wrote: “As necessity is the mother of invention, where organizations have failed, others have risen in their wake. The best solution is for the ARRL to be successful and turn this around; however, if the ARRL doesn't figure it out - so far they haven't been able to - and there's a need, odds are another organization will rise and hopefully will have learned from its predecessor's mistakes.” Since I wrote that things have gotten worse, and I've watched the ARRL make bad business decisions after bad business decisions. These decisions were not unique to amateur radio. They were rudimentary bad business decisions. More recently we saw an organization begin to rise, and instead of the ARRL learning best practices from what that organization was doing to attract members, they threatened to sue them. Those are the decisions a CEO makes, and they are not only unproductive, they are counterproductive.

[professor kv]

+1

[cbenulis]

Why on Earth is LoTW being taken down for an update during the week of Field Day?
48 responses...
https://groups.arrl.org/g/ARRL-LoTW/top ... 113759563

Seems to me like a transparency issue. If you know your servers could not handle
that many concurrent requests during FD.....

I tried to make a donation for 1 dollar and it said minimum donation is 10$.

73 AC1FS

[Michael M]

I tried to make a donation for 1 dollar and it said minimum donation is 10$.

Wow. I guess if you don't give the minimum demanded, your money is no good and they would rather have nothing. It's just incredible to me that every time I turn around it's another bad business decision. It is as if the goal is to destroy the organization.

Beyond the timing of this event, is the down time to complete it. This upgrade is not rocket science. It's done all the time and does not require a down time of this magnitude. It should be a few hours at most. Certainly not a week. Think of any business, any enterprise environment, and then imagine that business shutting down for a week to do a server upgrade. It's laughable.

It's interesting reading the comments there and elsewhere. Most of comments I have read were critical of this decision and the time it’s taking. A few others are sycophants who will defend this organization regardless of whatever it does, and in doing so unwittingly does more harm to the ARRL than help. Some of those comments are reminiscent of the toxic and entitled leadership at the ARRL. I would like to see the ARRL succeed, but they are so far from the path of achieving that I just don't see it occurring, and and certainly not with the current leadership.

[Michael M]

I just came across an interesting post. According to ARRL SW Division Director, Dick Norton, who tells it like it is, the current ARRL membership is at about 137,000. You would have to go back decades to see the last time the membership was that low, and they are losing about 1,000 members a month. Based on the reported loss of members during David Minister's current tenure, we see that the loss of members has been accelerating. It's not just raw numbers, their market share of licensed hams is tanking and is a fraction of what it was just 10 years ago.

I think the single greatest problem they face right now is the current CEO, David Minster. With the decisions he makes, it's almost as if he's trying to run the organization into the ground. The negative impact of those decisions are beyond just membership, and if we look at the membership there has been a precipitous drop since he became the CEO at the end of 2020.

Here's a post on Facebook with interesting comments.