The Gold Club Revised
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D., President, Avalanche Press
June 2011

Several years ago, I’m no longer sure exactly when, we launched our Gold Club for our most dedicated fans. The idea arose from the staff at the old Virginia warehouse, and for some time I resisted, unsure that we could deliver on all the promised benefits.

Everyone had suggestions on what those benefits should be, and foolishly, I allowed the Gold Club to be crafted committee-fashion. We promised a number of things that looked good at the time, but became difficult to deliver for various reasons or were just plain silly. It became imperative that the Gold Club be revised; I delegated this task but nothing happened. When I took over website updates last month, the Gold Club page mocked me. So I redid the benefits, based on things that hard experience has taught that we can actually deliver. Here’s what you get when you sign up:

● A 20% discount on all purchases through our web store.
Formerly, Gold Club members got 10% off their purchases through the web store or by phone and 20% off their purchases at conventions. As we’ve trimmed our staff, so have we trimmed our presence at cons, making for far fewer opportunities to use that added discount. That was also an enormous burden on us, hauling a list of Gold Club members around, flipping through it, keeping it from getting lost etc. Why we even bothered, I really don’t know – it’s not like people are out there committing Gold Club fraud – and I finally ordered The List left in the hotel and we just took the word of anyone who asked for the discount. A lot of members never attend shows, so why should they miss out on the higher discount level?

● Additional exclusive discounts.
We’ve done a lot of discounting for at least the past couple of years. There were unexpected events of many types that drove this need, but also a near-disastrous reluctance to trim staff to match financial reality. After a great deal of thought and study, it’s pretty clear that the discounting hasn’t raised significantly more cash flow. I did manage to obtain desperately-needed cash for us at key moments, but it didn’t come from discount sales. These also devalue the Gold Club member discount, if we’re giving 40 percent off to just anyone who stumbles across our website.

There will still be special prices, but most of them will be exclusive to Gold Club members.

● The new Gold Annual, a 64-page book with exclusive content, usually including maps or counters or both.
Initially we offered free counter sheets, but when we moved printing back to the United States this became far more difficult (and much more expensive). There were complaints about the lack of free counters, many complaints, and other complaints (though not as many) that what free counters we did produce came with nothing else and members had to wade through the website to discover how these were to be used.

As counters have become difficult to produce, we have been able to make books (maps are a little more difficult, but not nearly as hard to make as counters). Ideally I’d like to include both counters and maps with the Annual, so that a small unique complete game can be included, but I’ve finally learned not to promise such things. We have to include things within our means, and a book that perhaps includes one or two cardstock maps fits that description. Counters would depend on what other counter sheets were being produced at around the same time.

The annual would be built around its insert, with rules and background and whatever else supported the maps/counters. We’ll try to include as much original, exclusive material as we possibly can. To speed the first of these along we’ll probably go without counters, or at least not delay things to wait for them.

● The Gold Club Insider newsletter.
The Insider appeared sporadically over the first years of the Gold Club, with months sometimes passing between issues. I wrote the bulk of the copy, with Lys Fulda sometimes ghosting part of it, and then it was laid out as a .pdf file. How we delivered the .pdf then varied depending on who was handling it – sometimes a link to one of the secret pages on the company website, sometimes an e-mail attachment, sometimes by some other arcane means I do not understand.

Last month, I had to temporarily take over every company function, at least to some extent, and so learned to manage our e-mail contact software. Not having done actual layout work for a couple of decades, I decided to try an Insider just as an e-mail rather than an attached .pdf, and send it just like our News From the Front e-mail newsletter that goes to anyone who signs up.

I liked the results, and so I did another in that format, not least because it was an excuse to keep working with the software and figuring out how to use it more effectively. We’ll keep using this method because it’s much, much faster than the .pdf version. They do have to be somewhat shorter (there are limits on the amount of text we can put in one of these) and some words we can’t use because they touch off the fairly intense spam filters. On the plus side, they can come out much faster and, as long as we can come up with something to say, I’m planning to send them more or less bi-weekly.

What’s in the Insider? The one sent out today had a more detailed version of this list, plus a production update on the new boxed games finally going to press.

● Free downloadable games.
We’ve done two of these so far, Great War at Sea: U.S. Navy Plan Crimson and Infantry Attacks: The Chihuahua Incident. Both were very well-received, and The Chihuahua Incident let us preview the new Infantry Attacks series to our most dedicated players, allowing for some very valuable feedback before the first boxed game appeared.

There are a few I have in mind, both to preview upcoming game series or breathe a little life into older ones, or just because they’re odd and would never see publication otherwise. Ironclads and the modern version of Panzer Grenadier most definitely could use the preview approach, and we have some unusual topics like the War of the Austrian Succession or the War of the Castilian Succession that might work nicely in this format. There’s also a space game I’d really like to try out, and a few others.

At the moment, of course, all the effort’s going to the re-start of boxed game production so any new games in this format would be at least a few months off.

● Production Input.
We don’t use a vote-with-your-credit-card system to choose which games go into production; as I’ve explained before, by the time any game company has invested enough effort in a project to show off graphics and describe game play (the bare essentials to attract pre-orders), they’re made the call to produce the game no matter how many “pledges” or whatever come in. And at this point, we have plenty of already-promised games in the pipeline anyway.

Feedback is nonetheless invaluable, but it needs to be collected well before that stage to stop the publisher from pouring effort into a game no one wants. Pretty soon we’re going to have to think about what comes next, so we’re going to turn to the Gold Club for this guidance, with a series of polls open only to members. The contact software lets us conduct polls, and we’ll be experimenting with it later this week. We’ve done open polling on the website, and though it’s been a while since we ran one of those they did have some problems with sorting through the chaff for legit opinions. It’s also a section that lies outside my own web-making skill set.

● Renewals.
Since moving the company in 2009, we’ve had a great deal of administrative upheaval – some of it related to personnel, some to technology, most to the problems of new personnel interfacing with quirky technology and data. While we could shuffle through all the data to rebuild a Gold Club renewal list, with so many other pressures on us right now it’s not a cost-effective use of our resources.

So we’re going to kick that problem down the road, and extend all current Gold Club memberships as of 30 June 2011 through 31 December 2012. That’ll include anyone who joins up during the rest of June (since we list members by month joined).