RSGB: Up The Swanny?

The latest edition of RadCom just dropped through the letterbox.

Fair play, the editorial team are making what is a fairly obvious attempt to change the content so that it appeals to mere mortals as well as career engineers.

On page 7, half-yearly and unaudited accounts are presented.  They make for troubling reading, indeed.

Having ridden a significant but very short-lived wave of sales during the centenary year (2013), 'normality' is now coming home to roost.  This month's RadCom heavily promotes the new Handbook, whilst trying to get members to boost the society's income with a £5 book token. 

Whilst I could go through a lot of detail, the bottom line is that the RSGB has taken a huge, 9.2% drop in income as compared with the half-yearly results for the same period last year.  Its income from interest has halved in one year.  The RSGB states it expects a "roughly break-even" position for the full year.

Now I don't know much about business, but when faced with a situation like this, a subscription fee hike would appear to be wise, if unwelcome.

One detail that I think the membership ought to severely criticise the Board for is its continued operation and financial support for its ill-conceived National Radio Centre at Bletchley Park.  This accounts for an overhead of £18,414 - or a staggering 25% of the RSGB's total non-activity overheads.  I've said it before and I'll say it again - the NRC has no meaningful worth to the society or its membership, and is entirely unaffordable.  It has been the focus of much criticism and needless expense.  Why it isn't being closed down as an expensive luxury is something that will become a louder cry in coming months, I think.

Urgency should be setting in amongst the Board members and all members of the society alike.  If the society maintains its current, quite static line of activity, then it has only a few years left before hitting the hard rocks of financial unsustainability.

Many have commented in the recent past that the RSGB has only "about ten years left."  On the latest results, that would seem to be rather optimistic.  Membership, and so income, is still falling, and the realisation that nobody's been doing anything to attract newcomers to the hobby has come way, way too late.  Many of the RSGB's members have been only too enthusiastic to play their part in the downfall, in their attempts to keep radio an exclusive man's club.

The RSGB now runs, unless it shows exemplary management direction, the potential risk of making mistakes in an effort to improve its future prospects.  With a break-even outcome, it has no latitude to invest in improvements to services to its membership, many of whom seem simply to join "for the magazine".  It has reached a point where it can only - just - keep its head above water.

The time for a total revamp of the society, how it does things, what it throws money at, and what services it provides, is now.  Not tomorrow.  Not the next time a new Board is appointed. Now.  If not, then during the next couple of years, we'll be seeing accounts with little more than increasingly red numbers.

On the positive side, we can take a glass half-full approach and say that the RSGB's time may have passed, and that a new kind of representative for the radio community should come into existence.  Many would welcome that, and I would be one of them.