Landmarks:

We overhauled our Web site, giving it a new look and a clearer structure. We conducted a survey of existing and potential organizational members, which was written and summarized by Mike Hohmann. We held a capital campaign that raised more than $3,000 in six weeks to cover the cost of a new server and hired a system administrator to ease the transition. We moved into a temporary office space near downtown Minneapolis. We received another $10,000 grant from the ADC Foundation. The board of directors met to create a new mission statement and strategic direction document. On the new server, we began hosting virtual domain names for our organizational members. Finally, we received a $20,000 two-year grant to do outreach in North Minneapolis during 2000-01.

Outstanding Volunteers:

Among the many volunteers who helped the Free-Net in 1999, two in particular stand out:

Glen Christianson helped the ECCO and CARAG neighborhoods get online and expressed an interest in helping more neighborhoods. He took over the position of liaison to organizational members and proceeded to put the accounts into strict order. He filled in all the gaps in our records through persistent correspondence and canceled the accounts that would not pay their invoices. When we began offering three levels of service instead of just one, he modified the database to keep track of the additional information. We now know the precise status of each organizational account, thanks to Glen.

Bill Caudle has maintained the Free-Net's support for Eudora dialup more or less single-handedly for the past few years. When we moved to our new server, this was among the last features to be reconfigured to work under the new operating system, because relatively few people use it, and none of the other volunteers knew just how to fix it. Bill kept working on the problem ... even after a stroke put him in the hospital for a week. At last he announced that the problem was fixed; Eudora dialup was as good as new.

Individual Membership:

Unfortunately, the downward trend in membership that we saw in 1997 and 1998 continued in 1999. Figure 1 shows membership events by month through all of TCFN's history, while Figure 2 is a close-up of the past two years.

• Provisional accounts are those that have completed the online registration but not sent in their confirmation forms. They become active registered accounts when their confirmation forms are received. We have never yet deleted provisional accounts for inactivity, which is why there are so many of them in the graph at right.
• Active registered accounts are those that have sent in a confirmation or renewal form in the past year. We experienced a net decrease of 406 active members over the course of the year.
• Suspended registered accounts are those that used to be active but failed to send in a renewal form in time. Suspension lasts for 6 months, during which time the account may be renewed, but after which it will be deleted. The figure for January '99 in the table at right is inflated because no accounts had ever been deleted until February '99.

Organizational Membership:

We were surprised to discover that nearly half of our organizational members had stopped paying their fees. Glen made contact with most of the inactive members, but even so, 72 organizations' accounts were rendered inactive when we moved to the new server. Those that are active now enjoy their own login accounts with the name of the organization and the choice of three levels of service: "Basic," "Better," and "Best." Including new members that signed up since our move to the new server, we now have a total of 75 organizational members. Twelve of them -- mostly new ones -- have taken advantage of the Best level of service, with its support for custom domain names.

Donations:

We had expected that membership renewals would provide a reliable "renewal hump" in donations each summer. This did occur in 1999 (Fig. 3), but it was only about half the size of the 1998 hump. (There was also a second donation hump in the spring due to the capital campaign for a new server.) Given our trends of declining membership, we can expect the renewal hump to be even smaller in summer 2000.

The capital campaign caused an enormous spike in average donations (Fig. 4), and average donations remained high the rest of the year as well. (The averages in this graph only include those people who made donations.)

Changing Community Needs:

As e-mail, Internet access, Web hosting services, and online discussion forums become ever more affordable and ubiquitous, the niches that the Free-Net serves are becoming smaller. We should regard this not as a threat but as a success -- the problems we exist to solve are being solved! The services that used to be radically new ideas are becoming institutions. We must continually ask ourselves how we can best serve the needs that the community has today and those that it may have in the near future. Do we provide basic communication tools to those who have no other options? Do we offer premium services to high-budget operations? Or both? We must act in accordance with our mission and goals.

System Administration:

We hired Jarrod Stenberg as a system administrator primarily to ease our transition to a badly needed new server. Now that Jarrod has left the Twin Cities, we plan to hire another part-time sysadmin to take his place. Yet TCFN is still a volunteer organization at heart; ideally the server should be comprehensible enough that it can be maintained without any one person in charge. As the communication tools we offer become more established in the commercial sector, we may want to leave our server behind altogether and pursue our mission in other ways.

Promotion through Partnerships:

Many of our attempts to promote use of the Free-Net have been disappointing. Those that were rewarding and successful in 1999 involved partnering with other organizations. Our booth at the Fair in Stevens Square was a success because we promoted it in advance through the neighborhood's existing block clubs. We got enthusiastic support from the Minneapolis Public Libraries when we stopped sending them unsolicited bunches of brochures and instead met with the Libraries' Internet tutors. And finally, we secured a grant to do outreach in North Minneapolis when we stopped looking to outside agencies and began looking inside the community itself. We must ask ourselves whom we intend to serve, what organizations are already working with such people, and how we can help those organizations meet their own goals by promoting the Free-Net.

Collaborative Outreach:

Our two-year grant to work in North Minneapolis will ensure that we make contact with a wide variety of organizations in this important region that we have overlooked in the past. The grant will pay our expenses as we provide classes and organizational memberships to up to 200 of these organizations. Other possibilities include working with the Internet tutors of other library systems to distribute Free-Net brochures and training as the Minneapolis Public Libraries have now begun to do; working with regional police units to improve community access to online safety information; and creating online communities for organizations that work with deaf, hard of hearing, blind, and physically disabled persons.

Classes as a Primary Service:

In the past, the primary obstacle to Free-Net use was access to computer equipment. That is no longer so much the case; now the obstacle is education. The free commercial services that are making many of our online tools redundant do not give classes or small-group tutoring, because they have no local presence. There are other local organizations that provide low-cost classes and tutoring, but they cannot meet the demand. We can and should help meet that demand.

Volunteers and Interns:

As General Manager I still have a lot to learn about effective volunteer coordination. I will make it my personal goal to learn techniques and strategies from other volunteer coordinators and to share many of my tasks, such as teaching classes, with volunteers and interns. Volunteer work should be personally rewarding and educational -- it's my job to make it so, and I will do that in 2000.

It has been a pleasure working for Twin Cities Free-Net for another year. I have high hopes for 2000!

Ben Stallings
General Manager