[Finance] Psychological Aspect of the Finances

[Dan Hess]

So I was talking earlier today with Brimstone (Makers Local 256) about the
psychological aspects of the finances that we at Midsouth Makers have
encountered and it lead me to wondering what others might have for input on
this.  I'd like to hear about any sort of "herding cats", "controlling the
masses", and psychological warfare type of situations, events, changes, or
anything else that other spaces have encountered.  And hopefully after
reading our spaces encounter with it you'll grasp the idea a little better
of what I mean.

Let me preface this with we are still very much so in our infancy stage and
are learning by leaps and bounds every day.

In the very beginning, once we knew a financial goal that we would need to
hit in order to move into a place, we decided we would need to implement
some form of collections from the people showing up.  I would assume that
almost every space hits that exact same point.  Well we figured out that we
had X number of people coming, and we needed Y amount, so if we collected Z
from each of those people we would get there in a matter of 3 or 4 months.
 So we decided we would see about starting some form of collection.  What we
did was make the mistake of terming that collection as "dues" which gave it
a mandatory/required or else type of connotation.  We paid the price as a
result of that too.  We've spent quite a bit of time trying to recover from
the people that no longer show up likely due to that for the most part.  The
response that we essentially got was that we were attempting to sell a
product that (and charge for it) that did not exist yet, and so people who
were not seeing the vision felt no need to pitch in.  What we've resorted to
now is doing away with the term "dues" until there is an actual mandatory
aspect to it.  Now we have our set goal and are requesting pledges/donations
in order to accomplish our goal, and that is exactly how we word it to all
our regulars.  Any time we give an update on our goal we usually word it as
such "we are X number of donations of $45 away from our goal."  This has
overall had a reasonable result on our group working very nice as motivation
and encouragement all without discouraging them or enticing them to run away
as a result of a mandatory monthly payment.

We've had a few other little things here and there, and I'm personally very
much so interested in other psychological concepts of handling the group
whether it be finance related or not, but I hope that the above helps to
explain the kind of input that I'm curious to hear about.

Thanks,
Daniel

- Copying one is plagiarism, copying many is research.
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