How To Make The NPA Important Again (Part 2)

In the long exchange of ideas that I had with another pigeon fancier regarding the NPA and how it seems to have become somewhat irrelevant to many fanciers, one of the things that I pointed out is the NPA Quarterly Bulletin. This seems like a part of the NPA that has seen better days.

Now I know that some are going to disagree with me on this but please keep an open mind. How about this: instead of publishing a quarterly bulletin, how about the NPA contracts with Purebred Pigeon (PP) magazine to do an annual NPA focused issue. Once a year, say the March/April issue, the NPA gets a whole issue devoted to updates on the club, shows, and other NPA business. Specialty clubs regularly get an entire issue devoted to them; why can't the NPA do this on a regular basis?

I can hear a few of the objections already:

1. Not every NPA member has a subscription to Purebred Pigeon nor should they be forced to get one. Fair enough. For this annual issue, the NPA has extra copies printed to be mailed to those members that don't get PP. Of course, we might want to encourage members to subscribe to PP but that wouldn't be necessary for this scheme to work.
   
2. People that are not members of the NPA will see the NPA update. So what? If they see what the NPA is doing, maybe they'll be persuaded to join. Advertising a volunteer organization is not a bad thing. The current bulletin doesn't seem to be a major selling point for the NPA anyway. Maybe an annual NPA issue might help to persuade people that they should join the NPA.
   
3. What happens if Purebred Pigeon goes out of business? I sincerely hope they don't but if they do, then the NPA can always revert back to what it's doing now.
   
4. We need more than one update per year for the NPA. I'm not so sure about that. Show results are often shared via the various specialty clubs and the NPA could "lease" the March/April issue so that there would be plenty of time to tabulate the results from the Grand National.
   
5. We'll have to share the revenues from the NPA Bulletin with Purebred Pigeon magazine. I'm not sure--does the NPA sell ads in the quarterly bulletin? Is it a really large revenue stream for the club? I mean this might be a real obstacle if the club were to decide to go this route. In fact this may be the only real obstacle that I can see to pursuing this idea.

This arrangement would give the NPA a much nicer, more professional looking "bulletin", it would save the NPA on postage costs to those members that are also subscribers to PP and it would help to keep the only magazine we have in the US devoted to show pigeons alive and well.