The Hobby: APIC Elections & The Future

Hobby posts are where we discuss the hobby of political collecting, organizational issues within the OR-APIC or National APIC, or just generalized discussions that might be important to the members or potential members of the American Political Item Collectors non-profit. 

2020 is not just an election year from America, but it is an election year for the APIC, the parent organization of the Oregon APIC (we are a geographic chapter). In the May edition of the Bandwagon (a publication sent out monthly), APIC members that are currently paid up on their dues ($42.00 a year) will get a ballot. By and large, these elections are a sleepy affair. Rarely is a race contested seriously. The positions seem even less desirable than running for your local cemetery board. Why is that you might ask?



It's hard to tell really. It is a hobby organization. The people that step up to serve really love this hobby. We have some great volunteers. No one is going to get famous or springboard from their work here to some higher position. There are no fancy perks from what little I can gather from serving on the board of directors. It's hard to even find out what the board of directors does when they do have meetings. There is no place on the website that posts minutes of the meetings or even announces that meetings will take place. There must be work going on if they call these meetings. Sometimes we are lucky to get a Treasurer's Report in the Bandwagon, but again, there is no place on our website to see any of the ongoing governance documents.

Organizations need to communicate to tell their stories with members and with the folks that they want to sign on to the cause. Right now, the APIC doesn't do this very well. Which is odd, because we have some great folks from the political, government, and non-profit world as members! We just are not communicating effectively. With the amount of information available our newsletter should be bi-weekly in digital form instead of monthly in print (where information may already be out of date by the time you get it).  I see all these posts online from our Facebook group, they are random, but a coordinated effort by a communications team could elevate our organization and grow an audience with purposeful interactions.

 It's a big problem for me that our organization is mainly communicating with its members the same way it was communicating in the 1980s. It's 2020 now.  I have heard time and time again that our members prefer a hard copy of the newsletter. That's fine. Are we simply going to wait for those members to pass on before adding a digital version? Growing an audience and members are going to require us to communicate digitally in ADDITION to our print newsletter.

I really don't know if I will bother to fill out my APIC ballot when it comes to me this May and as someone that works professionally to turn people out to vote that's saying something. I have appreciated the emails reminding me to renew my membership. I'm glad we are at least doing this small outreach digitally. Even if all the APIC did was take our current newsletter, put it in a PDF and email it out to their list they would be putting more effort into digital communication than I have seen since I first joined in 2007. No linkable or interactive content, just a simple PDF file. It would be a start and then we could develop a newsletter that integrated our website, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts.