I just want to start this off by saying thank you to the members that keep coming back and making this journey a special one. Some have been here for a couple years even and that in itself is enough to keep me going. This includes members like @friendswithbears that keep me going when I didn’t think I had a shot at making this into a community.
Each day I check in and see a new member or 2 which gives me hope. In the past, Nikki and I would sign people up if they showed interested in being a member. That of course stopped the surge in membership which was fine for me. I realized that people that took the steps in registering were the ones that took the time to post and maintain their accounts. It was a bit of a blow going from 60 new members a day to 1 or 2. Then it becomes a question of quantity over quality, and I am a quality type of guy.
It’s October again and It’s now been 1 year that Nikki came on board. We went from 130’sh members to what we have today. So much more content and places for people to contribute to. So I wanted to theme this ramble on membership, where we have been in the last 12 months and hopefully where we are going.
In the last 12 months these things happened:
- We added the newsletter in Jan 2016.
- We added the Wiki, Articles, FAQs, Groups, and chat.
- Over 5200 members joined.
- Our social media pages have grown to amazing numbers and we get hundreds of tweets/day.
- Upgraded to a VPS for faster load times.
- Prepped the Calendar and surveys.
- Added 5 new themes people can use.
- Built 35 user groups to highlight those who help.
- Rebuilt over 30 categories with prefixes for better search and sort.
These are some of the ones I can think of just off the top of my head. You will notice that a lot has happened in a short period of time and I truly don’t know if we will continue the same pace of not.
I do know that I have met some of the most incredible people that made the last year even more entertaining. In 2017 I hope to start meeting members as I do a bit of traveling. I want to make that a years of friendships and take lots of pictures and more. I am a bit excited and I hope the community is as well. It’s not the easiest world to be in with the death of forums for social media instead, but the ones that really want a community they could call home will stay.
As you can see, October is a special month for TMF. It’s not our birth date, but it’s when we grew up a bit. We all know that there are bigger communities out there and we are a small tadpole in the ocean of marijuana media. That doesn’t mean we can’t get to a level to where Google search result include us or build the reach we have been waiting for. There is a lot of possibilities over the next 12 months.
The things I want to focus on in the coming year is getting out and traveling and meeting members, having a regular newsletter on a weekly or monthly basis, and I want to continue putting up content that people want to read. All of those are really big items to tackle and I am up for the challenge. I would love to hear from you on what the last year and the year going forward looks like. Have we done a good job? Is this forum worth the venture? Have you enjoyed the things we have done? Are we missing anything?
I just wanted to add some of my thoughts since it’s been a while. It’s been busy over the past 4-6 weeks personally but I have been here every day looking for ways to improve. There is so much more to do, and I am excited to take on new challenges with all the members.
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