ACCESS
Active Citizens Cultivating Exploring Settling Space

"We go to Settle Mars, Play on the Moon, and Exploit the Asteroids."


The Affiliate Program: How it Works

ACCESS wants to double the membership of every one of our Affiliates. That's our commitment to our Affiliates, that's what we have to offer up front. In exchange, what we want from our Affiliates is
1. To keep doing what they're doing, but use the additional resources to do it better, and
2. Help us out from time to time in our efforts with our education program.

That much was established months ago. It’s a sweet deal, but the dilemma is how to pull it off. Like most good solutions, it's a bit obvious in hindsight.

ACCESS doesn't really need money for the next several months or more. What ACCESS needs is membership. But if ACCESS doesn't get some money flowing around in some fashion, it hasn't really gotten started yet.

Here's the program:

1. ACCESS extends a formal invitation to Selected Groups in a logical progression as determined on our forums. Note that we have an open, informal invitation extended at all times to all space orgs. No one has to wait for an invitation.

2. The Selected Groups process the invitation in whatever way they see fit. They modify our form letter as they see fit and accept on those terms; or they decline or ignore the invitation.

3. We review the acceptance letter, almost certainly approve it, and we have a new Affiliate. We renew unaccepted invitations quarterly.

In parallel with and often preceding the above, people join ACCESS and people join the Selected Groups and everybody’s membership grows; here’s how that works:

A. The Active Citizens of ACCESS, on an individual basis but with our calling card, subscribe/join/contribute to one of the Selected Groups at their discretion and choice, informed by our discussions. Our members send money to the groups they would like to see as ACCESS Affiliates and those fine organizations see a bit of growth on their part of the snowball.

B. We ask that the members of the groups return the favor and join ACCESS. We grow each other’s membership via mutual support. A simple trade so far, that much has been out there for months, but here’s the dilemma: so far it’s just ‘extracting’ more money from the ‘true’ space advocate. Here’s the twist I had to find to actually ‘start the snowball down the hill’:

C. ACCESS needs to channel money *into* the space advocate community, not just move it around. We’re not here to pick the pockets of your members. Sure, we need space advocates to step up to the plate a couple more times, but we’re not gonna finance our own space program without bringing in bucks from outside our own normal sphere of influence.

D. To join ACCESS, you join one of our existing or potential Affiliates. You pick from the current list of Affiliates, and if you just can’t see them as your best choice, then you join a different group, maybe from our list of Selected Groups. You communicate your new membership status to us, and hey presto you’re a member of ACCESS which gives you a very tiny chance of getting a free ride to space. (If you get there some other way, you get a free drink at one of our Affiliate’s facilities.)

E. ACCESS is going to get money (*) from our Affiliate Program by getting matching fund grants. For every membership we create, we get $x from whatever sources we can find. In the meantime, let the money flow between our Affiliates, let’s get a membership boost actualized. They don’t need to worry about what ACCESS is doing with their member’s money; they just need to deal with increased membership. If ACCESS can’t find the money, well tough for us, but our Affiliates are growing, so we’re at least making a difference. We’re not in this thing to get rich anyway, right? (*) – This money just needs to be enough to get our operations going, to get ready to effectively recruit the rest of the 39 Million people we need to pull off our own space program. We will also try to build a surplus to fund our ‘white paper’ program.

This is a mechanism to allow growth of space advocacy in several ways at once.

We channel money to existing organizations ‘from within’ in order to get started up the growth curve. That force remains throughout the life of ACCESS: taking one individual at a time, and multiplying their effect multiple times. I can see people some day commonly belonging to a dozen space orgs or more.

We grow space orgs ALL ACROSS THE WORLD, which is my favorite part of this solution: a 501(c)(3) Non-Profit Organization cannot accept money from non-US Citizens, that’s my understanding anyway. This solution lets space advocacy money flow between countries and continents. You don’t need a tax write-off to justify spending money on space advocacy, do you? Well then, let ACCESS become a clearinghouse for cross-country membership in space orgs.

This mechanism has the potential to deliver on the promise of doubling the membership of our Affiliates, and it grows our membership roles as well of course. We need that broad-based advocacy to properly inform our space program’s development anyway. IOW, we need to get the Affiliate program going before we can expect to get the forums going, and then we can get on with planning our space program.

With this solution, the levels of *individual* participation in ACCESS can be defined at last:

Visitors are folks checking us out on the web.

Users are folks who register in our Community Section and participate in the forums and some of the other features.

Members are folks who have joined a space org on our behalf, and so have enabled us to obtain matching funds from our benefactors. Members have made a financial commitment in their space advocacy.

This dilemma being solved, we can now move forward with our Affiliate Program, I’ll start a thread to develop the first list of Selected Groups.

spacester – Nov 12 2005

Affiliate top page

Affiliate Agreement

How do we get the snowball rolling?

This page created on November 12 2005