Firstly I think the delay here has been getting the final game deal organized, If that is squared away and we know what we are doing for the year then we can start to sell yearly memberships.
That doesn't however absolve the memberships department from the blame for the last few years. Having discussed STH's and memberships on many occasions with many people I do have a bit of an insight on that team.
Many of us were critical of the team pre 2008, some thinking that the head of the team was only there to try to "score" a player. Either way that person trained up an offsider and although memberships were low for the 2009 season they ran quite will with the sometimes exception of the email list.
That team put together the new memberships package under the board, this switched STH's to members and featured heavily with our history. The 2010 memberships packages were available to buy at the 2009 Grand Final, indeed members were invited to renew the week of the grand final.
During the 2009-2010 summer the club knew that it would be losing the offsider as they were moving to a similar role at ANZ stadium. So the head of memberships was asked to train a new person, a 21 year old lady named Jack. Once Jack was trained, the head of memberships was retrenched, 3 weeks out from the 2010 season.
AFAIK Jack was responsible for the 2011 and 2012 season memberships with some help from previous members of the department during the heavy renewal season and the remainder of the off season to process the membership requests.
However in the 2011 off season, Jack was part of a claim of work place bullying and only came forward once she had secured work elsewhere I am told.
So I think this year’s memberships team is all new again. I could be wrong but it would be nice to have some consistency in the membership team.
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