words have meaning (SCA)

[cellio]

About a year ago the SCA corporation started imposing a $3/person/event fee for people who are not members of the corporation. (Events are produced by local groups at their own expense and are generally designed to roughly break even.) The corporation calls this $3 fee a "non-member surcharge", and some people have argued that that's not sufficiently positive and want to call it a "member discount" instead. I sent the following to the kingdom mailing list, but I wanted to record it here too. The argument comes around frequently; I think I'll probably need these words again in the future. :-)

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The $3 fee is not a discount. Technically, it's not really a surcharge either. Discounts and surcharges are price adjustments offered by the entity setting the price. Most events offer discounts for children, and some set surcharges for late reservations. The salient point, though, is that the person or group whose bottom line is affected sets these adjustments and deals with the consequences. (To those who would say "but AAA gives me discounts at hotels!", I say: no, those hotels agreed to grant those discounts to people associated with AAA. AAA does not have the ability to impose a discount on an unwilling hotel.)

A fee assessed by an outside entity is a tax. Taxes are usually set by governments, of course, but in this case it is set by the corporation. Either way, the taxing authority has no direct involvement in the activity being taxed. It's a fee paid in exchange for permission to do business.

This is not just a point of pedantry. Words have meaning, and if you use an inappropriate word you change people's perceptions of the thing being described. It is misleading to call this fee a "discount", in my opinion, and the corporation was right to avoid that usage. It's unfortunate, but not too surprising, that they didn't acknowledge it as a tax.

Comments

Re: The whole membership system is screwy

[cellio]

It's hard to justify the cost of corporate membership, especially to newcomers and especially to folks outside the US (who don't even get the minimal benefits of insurance and favorable tax treatment). You get nothing for your money over there, but there aren't enough of you to start your own affiliated corporation like they did in Australia and now Finland.

Here's a question: if you didn't have enough people to form an official shire, what would happen? You'd still be SCA people, subjects of the kingdom of Drachenwald. What support would you get from the kingdom? Would it be less than the support you're getting now? Can you function as a household or just plain unaffiliated group of SCA people for a while, without formally becoming a shire? Would that make it harder for you to put on events, for example?

Shire-hood

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

Well, for one thing they have trouble getting insurance for their events, have to find a marshal, seneschal, etc., from other groups to promise and then actually do it to show up at their events or stuff isn't legal, and so on. Or, at least that's the way it was the last time I looked into it.

Re: Shire-hood

[cellio]

Zach is in Israel. Popping over to help out from the shire next door involves a plane ticket. :-) (I don't know what the insurance situation is like for them, but the US corporation's insurance policy is unlikely to be helpful to them.)

I know he's in Israel...

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

Zach is in Israel. Popping over to help out from the shire next door involves a plane ticket. :-)

Which is why having officers of their own tends to be important. We worked hard for getting shire-hood for a group in Soo Ste. Marie (sp?) because their events kept falling apart when officers from groups would bug out on them.

I'm actually not as concerned about the insurance.

Re: I know he's in Israel...

[cellio]

Ah, ok. I see what you're saying now.

The alternative approach is for them to focus on "doing med/ren stuff" together now, and worry about organizational affiliation later. Not being an official shire doesn't preclude them from having events; they just had their first feast a couple weeks ago. It might preclude them from advertising events in the kingdom newsletter (I don't know Drachenwald's policies), but for now that probably isn't much of a concern because they know how to reach the locals and the non-locals won't come anyway.

If they go along in this way for a while, people will get somewhat acculturated with the SCA and may come to see the value of corporate affiliation, at which point finding five people to cough up the money won't be such a problem. It's hard to convince people to pay for a membership on top of event fees if they aren't even sure yet if they want to do this whole medieval thing. The benefits of membership to the individual are basically nil; some people will do it for the group once they've grown attached to the group -- but that takes time.

Membership

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

I see -- if you don't care about official events, then having fun is the best way to go. And I agree totally.

Re: Membership

[cellio]

I don't know if they care about that; I just wanted to raise the question.

Whatever they do, I hope they're able to get the resources they need to have the fun they want to have -- whether that's convincing people to become members, or something else. They're pretty new, and they don't have to decide everything right away.

I wonder if the broader SCA (society and corporation) should be thinking about ways to make things easier for new groups, particularly new groups populated by new people. It must seem pretty overwhelming at times -- get five people to buy memberships, and choose officers according to these rules, and set up your bank account this way, and file these quarterly reports, and so on. If your sponsoring group is close enough that their people can show up at your practices and help you do the year-end financial report and so on, that makes it easier -- but what if you're remote, like these folks or the group you helped set up? What can we do to make this less of a challenge, so they can be up and running with the fun stuff quickly?

Fun

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

At one point, the Board had appointed a Chatelaine who's job was make it easier on new groups and sort of "shepherd" them along. I don't know if that position is still around. Sigh.

Re: Membership

[zachkessin.livejournal.com]

Well they should think about new groups and how to make it easier for them and so on. It should be noted that we have had one event so far and are planning 2-3 more. So we are doing stuff.

Re: Shire-hood

[zachkessin.livejournal.com]

Well since as I understand it the US Corporation's insurance mostly covers the SCA Inc its very irrelivant. You would have a very hard time sueing the SCA inc in an Israeli court just because it does not operate in any meeningful way here. In theory you could sue the members, but none of us have any money etc so its kind of a moot point.

We are looking at forming a corperation here, the sister of one of our members is a laywer here and we will at some point ask her to look into it for us.

Re: Shire-hood

[cellio]

You might also talk with the folks who set up the SCA corporation in Finland to see what issues they had to deal with from the SCA side. (Obviously they will not be able to help you with Israeli law. :-) )

Re: Shire-hood

[zachkessin.livejournal.com]

The insurance is a moot point anyway. I'm not even sure what it covers in the USA here it does nothing. So what does it mean if the event is not "Legal" exactly. Who is going to care?

At some point we will get some group in the kingdom to sponsor one of our events so it can be on the kingdom calendar. (probably the Lag'b Omer event) But I still don't expect anyone from outside the shire to show up.