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its practical applications as well as the current ASA strategic initiative of engagement with industry.
Expenses for the ASA Standards Program on average were $575k per year over the past 5 years. On average, 75% of this cost is recovered with revenues from the sales of stan- dards and annual fees from organizational members. This reduced the actual cost to the ASA of running the program to approximately $143k per year during this period. Nonethe- less, expenses, such as fees to the ANSI, secretariat expenses, and license fees to IEC and ISO have increased (and continue to increase) at the rate of about 3% per year. In addition, the number of standards published has increased by more than 115% over the past 15 years. Without increasing revenue, we would be unable to maintain the resources required to sup- port these efforts. This also left us with little or no resources for promotion, advertising, or public relations. Lastly, prices for our standards have remained unchanged for over a decade, although organizational membership fees have been adjusted each year. In addition to a growing price disparity with simi- lar SDOs, particularly for standards over 25 pages, the rising costs of balloting, copy editing, publication, and ANSI accredi- tation have made it difficult simply to keep our debt ratio at or below 25%, much less progress toward breakeven. The old price model, including ASA member benefit giveaways, failed to account for inflation and increases in the cost of doing busi- ness. Furthermore, this model was not well aligned with the
ASA strategic initiative of fiscal responsibility.
Standards as an Acoustical Society of America Member Benefit
In 2007, ASA Standards launched a member benefit program:
ASA members could download up to five free standards every year, with the exception of Nationally Adopted International Standards (NAIS). Nevertheless, NAIS was offered to ASA members in lieu of one of the free national standards at an extremely discounted price of $35 each. (Note that the iden- tical ISO or IEC standard purchased directly from the ISO or IEC is priced at $160 and up!) Additionally, beyond the 5 free standards, an ASA member discount of 25% still applied. Overall, this resulted in a 60% reduction in gross revenue per standard for ASA members in the period from 2007 to 2018. From this reduced gross revenue, ASA Standards still owes a royalty on the list price to our reseller as part of our licensing agreement. This ASA member benefit program was intended to raise member awareness of the ASA Standards Program, increase ASA member participation in the Stan- dards Program, and increase ASA membership. Although
raising awareness appears to have been marginally accom- plished, there are no data whatsoever to support the premise that more ASA members participated in the ASA Standards Program or that any individuals joined the ASA because they were provided free standards. Furthermore, the number of free standards distributed as a member benefit far outpaced what we provided to paying customers. From 2007 to 2019, the number of standards ASA has given away for free was 32,601, whereas the number of paid standards during this period was 4,145 (see Figure 1).
The enormous gap between these figures represents a lost opportunity cost of $3.6M (vs. $456k realized) in this time period based on a $110 average price per standard. Clearly, not all ASA members who downloaded standards because they were free would have paid for the same content. None- theless, even a low conversion rate of 10% or 15% of free to paid standards during this period would have resulted in an increase to revenues sufficient to cut our annual deficit by more than 30% every year. In recent years, there has also been a marked decline in the utilization of this member benefit.
A more insidious complication was that this lopsided ratio of free to paid standards inhibited our ability to negotiate fair and reasonable terms for distributor and reseller agree- ments. Although the usual and customary reseller fee for these services is on the order of 30%, the agreements in place for some time had us paying 50% or more of the list price for every standard sold. Likewise, under these conditions, resellers were not incentivized to market or promote ASA Standards. Moreover, this lopsided ratio of free to paid stan- dards virtually eliminated any opportunity to be perceived as a competitor in the standards marketplace. Emphasis was dis- proportionately placed on the ASA member benefit instead
Figure 1: Number of free versus paid standards from 2007 to 2019.
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