Here is the latest version of our membership brochure — a work in progress....

Comments:

1. Great job, all.  It feels like progress towards a successful capital development campaign.
2. It has to be simple & expensive to print and handout.  The rule is for every 100 handouts, you'll get 1 taker.  For every 100 takers, you'll get 1 committer.  So you'll need to print 1000 copies before 1 person joins as a member.  It shouldn't be more than 1 page, front & back.  I agree with 99% of what you're ready to publish.
3. The primary job will then be to hand it out in droves.  I researched printing last year and our group decided to go with http://www.moxicopy.com/.  Best printer for ease, cost and green. 
4. Just one small change:  Somehow relate that there's a forum at commongoodbank.com.  Something like "Have questions?  Join the discussion at http://commongoodbank.com/forum/."  
5. I like the suggestions for a new & improved Q&A, posted  prominently on the main page as a PDF.  Someone should rake through the whole forum for core questions, and our answers.  If people want hard copy, they can print it.  Or community division organizers can attach it to an email.  Networking, networking, networking.

If we include FAQ with the piece we are immediately engendering doubt at the same time that we're trying to make a positive impression. Especially if it is an insert (had to be added later than original - because people had so many questions). Why raise questions that have not or may not concern the individual? Anyone serious enough to consider joining will visit the website where they expect to find a FAQ page to consult, if they so desire. Questions in bold letters are what the individual will notice and remember (e.g." Why is membership so complicated?" or "Why such a low return?") - not the short, necessarily insufficient answers to these important questions. We want the CDO's to handle, in person or on the phone, any important questions that the prospective member has - as they arise. I think we're trying to do too much with something which is meant (I think) to simply reinforce the presentation that they've just been given bv a representative of the project; so that they have something tangible to link back to us that highlights the essence of what we're doing and what we want them to do.

Maybe we should just add this tagline on the last page: Questions? Contact the organizer who gave you this brochure or visit the FAQ page on our website:commongoodbank.com.

I like the cribsheet, have all the CDO's weighed in on it?

Rick

Life can be expensive, so I understand that. Personally, I'm looking for work that is part of the kind of social change I'd like to see in the world. For this to be truly sustainable, thishis work can sustain me as well. That would be much more fun than simply taking a 9to5 that pays well and then putting that money into social change. It'd be much more fun because my work would be part of that social change.

I'd like to be paid a fair market value (or something close to it) because then I won't be sacrificing the contribution money can make to community programs.

As to specific pay, I'd look to salary.com with searches of "Computer programmer" and "Software Engineer". This is 60-70k for level 1, 80-100k for level 3 and 100-130k for level 5.

I like the idea of MOU contracts because that would give me reassurance in putting in my time. I assume other participants would like it too.

As Arkmundi calls attention to the value of "good employment", I think it's important to include those benefits that come with typical employment elsewhere. Usually this isn't associated with workers that are identified as "contractors". 

Similarly, the ESOP sounds like a good idea, though I did not like Arkmundi's use of the word "absurdity." I am now particularly curious to understand a bit more about the "reward labor not ownership" idea. 1) Because I suppose that risking one's money might also deserve reward and 2) Because won't the shareholders be owners?

I think that the brochure is a good, stand-alone piece, but it should come with more detail. Yes, I'll want to sit someone down and explain the membership program, but I'll also want to send them away with more detailed information.

My comments center more around revising or not including so much about Common Good Finance. The text is SO big picture and I'd like to see more tangibles… I would reexamine these mission and vision statements -- give it
more meat instead of it seeming so, so big picture. I respect the
bigger picture, but I'm guessing (since we're still dealing with such an
outdated, backwards banking system that is rarely even mentioned in
economic justice efforts) that most folks won't make the connections
between banking local and "sustainable agriculture and energy systems,
for local self-reliance, for ensuring that everyone has enough to eat, a
home, and satisfying work."what about: organizing communities to launch community-based, democratic economics for the common good of all. At least I have a better idea of what the desired outcome is — this other one is SO open-ended. Its so open, in fact, that its breezy and chilly in here! (grin)

I envision the accompanying materials including a FAQ, which Rick astutely points out should build off what most folks already know.

When the brochure is presented I think it should be coupled with some kind of interest that has already been generated through the CDO's message.  With the brochure should come the request of membership.  The brochure will yet again simply define what the CDO has talked about so that the prospective member sees the cohesion and feel confident about their decision.  If at all possible we should plan on having an envelope already made out to CGF that we can seal the brochure and check inside in front the of the founding member.

Edit:  In addition, the term "...progressive social change."  does not really define in my mind what is happening here.  My thinking is "foundational" or perhaps "fundamental" social change would be more accurate.  Drawing attention to how this banking model addresses the current economic crisis at it's root cause seems like the most efficacious route to creating an immediate passionate interest in the project to me.

On a more mundane level; my region is primarily a conservative region.  I am unsure how the term progressive would play out.

The mission of the brochure is to present

• a succinct, compelling case for the Common Good Bank system,
• a clear, single call to action, and
• a means to complete that action.

The brochure is intended as a supplement to individual contact — not as a substitute for it. That is, CGB organizers will need to talk to people, not just hand them a brochure.

Let us know what you think! (Note that some of the comments below have already resulted in changes to the brochure.)

not designed to be left sitting around or to be handed out willy nilly like a leaflet

If we don't want the brochure to be considered like a leaflet, or be casually distributed (which I agree with), why make it appear as one? To my mind, making it a form to complete and mail in suggests this, and at the same time diminishes the seriousness of the commitment. In this regard, the original brochure is superior. Best practice to utilize the brochure would likely be to hand it directly to a prospective member after a brief "elevator pitch." Our expectation should not be that that individual would use it to join or to provide us with their contact information; its function is to provide them with a tool to learn more about us – and and give them the CDO's contact information, for them to recontact him/her if they so desire on their own initiative (the CDO, of course, would endeavor to attain the prospect's info and record it separately). Then also drop all the requests for their info and provide ours: An endorsement quote from someone like Greco, Facebook or Youtube links, Website etc. and the name and contact info for the CDO.

In other words, describe the "tiered contribution plan" (donation, loan, investment), just drop the " I hereby …" and the "I am…" and substitute something like "Founding Members will -" or " as a Founding Member you are asked to …"

Possible solution to the Common Good Bank/Common Good Bank friction, which also has the high merit of retaining what I think is a succinct and effective motto:

At the top of the second page: "Not just another bank or credit union with a social mission … this is a social MISSION with a BANK!"

Drop the heading "About Common Good Finance" and substitute "The MISSION"

Really, that's what's being described here (the mission). Mention at the end of the mission description that Common Good Finance* is the grassroots organization responsible for attracting the support to establish the bank, which will then fulfill the mission.

* this should be the only reference needed to Common Good Finance.

Next, drop the heading "About Common Good Bank" and just say "The BANK" Would suggest the first line to be something to this effect: Unlike a standard credit union or a conventional bank, a Common Gook Bank would synergize the best aspects of each to create a powerful new instrument for social change.

The section that describes the membership plan could be headed:"FOUNDING MEMBERSHIP PLAN" instead of "Membership Agreement." Also, I don't like the phrasing of Common Good-"type" bank – looks like "fine print" and invites doubt about our intent. I understand why but I think the phrase common good banking could be substituted somehow.

In summary, as you recognize, the content of the brochure should be tailored to its intended use, toward which I believe the recommendations here proposed more accurately aligns. Again, the membership agreement form should be a separate form to be signed off on with the CDO present and receiving the check.

Another note: "suffer" is a loaded word, and is coupled with an unnecessary redundancy – economic justice followed by economic injustice. Instead of those suffering I'd consider those seeking economic justice and do some rephrasing to drop economic injustice.

Hope this is helpful.

1. The flyer now uses "member" throughout.
2. It now says "nonprofit grassroots organization" (instead of "small").
3. I changed the text a bit to blur the distinction and explain the relation between CGF and CGB. Unfortunately, regulations prohibit us from doing anything as CGB, so if we dropped one entity in the presentation it would have to be CGB, which would be even less ideal, I think.
4. I also disagree about separating the introduction from the membership form and about giving more written detail. I think ideally we want a single brochure and we want everything to be as simple as possible. This brochure has the bare bones of both the CGB concept and the membership system. It will be up to the organizer to explain both. This brochure is not designed to be left sitting around or to be handed out willy nilly like a leaflet. It is designed as a discussion piece for organizers to use when inviting people to become members. When I set up a meeting with an old engineer friend recently, I asked to meet with him with the express purpose of getting him on board the CGB project. I think that's what we want to do as organizers: be up front about our agenda -- for example "How would you like to have lunch with me so I can tell you about this great project I'm working on and see if you want to get involved" or "...see if you want to be a founding member".

• Brochure should be an introduction piece only, not a membership form (should not be entitled as such). The tiered program requires explaination and elaboration that only an organizer can provide.
• Much of what was dropped from the old brochure should still be included, instead of the overemphasis on how to contribute. Granted, the objective would still be to make that information concise and to exclude some of the more ancillary facets.
• The distinction between Common Good Finance and Common Good Bank is unnecessarily confusing to the reader, we should use one or the other in the brochure to identify the project.
• Suggested summary and substitute for description of our tiered plan (Building off what people are familiar with, credit unions):

The next big step in the evolution of the credit union concept, common good banking creates a more dynamic alternative with a greatly enhanced capability to seriously challenge the existing banking system. Like credit unions, every common good bank will be member owned - the advantage of this new model will be that individual members will have a much greater influence in their community and society by directly excercising democratic control over the use of their own money, in unison with other concerned citizen members. In order to make this advancement a reality, under existing banking regulations, it is necessary to raise capital just like the banks with whom we will be competing.To accomplish this in as democratic a manner as possible, an extensive grassroots campaign is underway to attract founding members whose contributions collectively will comprise the estimated 10 million dollars needed to be officially chartered by the FDIC.Becoming a founding member could be the single most potent action available to you at this time to address the daunting issues we all face locally, regionally and globally.The financial committment we are asking for includes all three of the following: (1) a donation to fund our national organizing (2) a loan which will immediately benefit communities while simultaneously helping underwrite chartering (3) an investment that will raise the additional capital required. Only the donation will not have a direct future financial return to you personally, although it will be instrumental to our overall success.There are many levels from which you can participate to help us achieve our goals, beginning as low as a total commitment for the three components of only $1150.00 (or really, whatever you can afford). If you are interested, please provide your contact information and a local organizer will follow-up with you. In the meantime, go to our website for more details.

• I have additional minor editing suggestions to make that I can cite later (e.g.no need to refer to ourselves as small, as in "small grassroots organization" - our ideas make us BIG.

• Common Good Finance or Common Good Bank, not both
• member or depositor, not both

1. First, I am happy to see the form. It looks great.
2. I see no language about forgiveability of the loan. If the loan is to be forgiveable, then there must be language about it in the brochure. This demonstrates transparency.
3. "bank-type" language raises a red flag. We are asking people to put cash on the barrel-head, yet suggesting that their money might not fund "a" Common Good Bank, per se. I believe an asterisk would clarify the issue, if I undersatnd it. That is, *banking regulations require that we do not refer to Common Good Bank as a reality prior to its charter." This also helps to demonstrate transparency.

hope this is helpful. Let me add, I am all for being positive. But I think we err if we allow our enthusiam and desire to succeed to cloud or blurr certain important realities. That is how corporations got their start!

3. I agree. However, we want to avoid footnotes, if possible. We don't want to include anything tricky, if we can avoid it. How about if we rephrase this as investing in "the Common Good Bank system" and "a Common Good financial institution". I think this makes it clear without introducing any new complexity.

2. We intentionally removed "forgivable" because it was misleading. We have no intention of ever asking that the loan be forgiven. Even if a charter is denied, we would still work to start the bank somewhere else. The agreement is accurate as written. However, since we have been talking about a forgivable loan until recently, this is a crucial point to clarify with organizers.

Thank you and I apologize. As your comments have made clear, we need to back up a step and agree first on some goals and criteria for IT Compensation Policy. I have added a proposal for those as a separate section in the policy proposal. I also inserted a "context" paragraph about our planned membership campaign, that addresses the most difficult constraints surprisingly well.

Why the hesitancy to go with ESOP model? I like many of arkmundi's points… (I see in later posts its because this option is only available for employees…?)

Johnathan makes a good point:

I think 10 programmers seems like a lot to start with and there are plenty of programmers that are willing to work for much less than you are suggesting.

I think arkmundi's comment deserves discussion amongst the team/board/etc.:

My intuition informs me that the primary investment is in an Internet-only bank. Hence, the time invested on the part of the CGB-IT team is primary, as in first. Attracting the necessary capital as a bank will be made easier for having proof of innovation in hand.

And another astute comment:

On an individual-by-individual MOU negotiated basis.

You want to make a policy, but it's getting a bit too specific since you, yourself, are hoping that at least some of the IT team will donate hours or voluntary request a reduction in pay.

And arkmundi speaks to what I initially felt when reading the proposal:

Sell-able stock would require in my mind, a public offering, SEC oversight and a whole bang-doodle of additional complication.

But I don't know enough about ESOP and the such to give an educated response.

And he also speaks to what I would really like to know — where is the IT team on this?:

I have consistently recommended that the CGB IT Plan endorse a join-and-contribute approach to open-source software utilization. That approach suggests making use of existing open-source software to the maximum degree possible, rather than starting a new code base from scratch.

William Spademan writes:

"the Articles of Incorporation should show two classes of stock…" -- This is unnecessary and counter to an egalitarian spirit.

Can you explain further?

There are too many moving components/variables in this project to be an Idelist/Purist. I grow wary when I hear statements like this:

In an ideal society, as long as everyone gets at least a living wage, no matter how deserving a person is, there should be a pretty low maximum wage…

If there were one piece of advice I could cement into the heads of the leaders of economic and monetary reform, it is this: don't be an Idealist/Purist and don't develop policies with that mindset. It lacks systems thinking.

There are more ideas to discuss and fine-tune. I look forward to our call tomorrow morning.

Most important are enterprises that are practical, anchored locally, and which either alter inequality directly or use profits for public or quasi-public purposes (or both). Employee-owned firms, co-ops, neighborhood-owned corporations, and a wide range of municipal and social enterprises, along with municipal and state investing agencies, are among the key locally based institutions of the “Pluralist Commonwealth” articulated in ABC.

That individuals work harder, better, and with greater enthusiasm when they have a direct interest in the outcome is self-evident. The obvious question is: why aren’t large numbers of businesses organized on this principle? The answer is: roughly 10,000 are. Indeed, 11.2 million Americans now work in firms that are partly or wholly-owned by the employees, three million more than are members of unions in the private sector (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2008, Table 3; National Center for Employee Ownership 2008).

Although there are 300-500 traditional worker co-ops, most worker-owned businesses are organized through “Employee Stock Ownership Plans” (ESOPs). Technically an ESOP involves a “Trust” which receives and holds stock in a given corporation on behalf of its employees.

In Ohio a survey completed in the mid-1990s found that employee ownership was becoming more democratic over time, with three times as many closely held companies passing through full voting rights to ESOP participants as had occurred in a previous 1985-86 survey (Business Week 1991, Logue and Yates 2001).

Most Americans have been taught to think of social ownership as inherently inefficient, undemocratic, even tyrannical. In the near term, the various practical efforts the book reports upon may be as important for what they teach about possibilities as what they accomplish in altering major trends. In this sense they are both precedents and instruments of popular education which help teach the practicality and common-sense nature of new principles. They may also slowly help build and nourish a larger community-building and more cooperative culture. ABC stresses that the fiscal crisis, on the one hand, and globalization, on the other, are forcing ever greater attention to neighborhood, municipal and other forms of enterprise which produce income flows for services—and to employee-owned firms and other institutions which anchor jobs in local communities threatened by global trade disruption.

That model recognizes the necessity of granting the greatest degree of freedom to developers, because the essential act is an act of creation. There is now ample proof of the exceedingly good results to be had when creative software development work is performed with such freedom and openness. Free & open is also a human culture. Team building and team playing require as much emotional intelligence as they do technical smarts. I could go on and on in this vein. The key proposal is CGB-IT as open-source project, with all that brings, and its a great deal.

If you can see that basic assumption as fundamentally valid, then the next step is to address the concerns expressed in this thread for fair compensation. All sustainable open-source projects have a commercial component, for the obvious reasons. There are various ways of doing that have been tried and proven to be successful.

I have laid out the alternative which I believe works best for both the CGB effort as a whole and the necessity to build a competent CGB-IT team that has a meaningful chance at success. And yes, with myself as a member of that team. That alternative is team as key stakeholder in future revenue, hence shares. Those are protected shares using an ESOP plan. There are obvious incentives at play. You say:

Yes, will will want to compensate labor with stock, at this stage when we have no cash. But Common Good Finance Corporation will not have any employees (just independent contractors), so our stock compensation plan will not be an actual ESOP.

The question is who then owns the bank and has a share in banking decisions and banking revenue? To suggest that the CGB will not have any employees, no ESOP and hence no means to provide the advance guarantees that come with such formalities, is to suggest a plan that I can have little faith in. ESOP's raise the status of employees to that of co-owners, and effectively eliminates that age-old dichotomies of capital vs labor, management vs employee, etc..

The suggestions I have made, expecially with respect to a specific employee-owned class of stock, are not individual-by-individual. Its for a block of stock owned in common by the CGB-IT team. It suggests for instance $10m in capital shares plus $1m in employee shares. The CGB-IT team must then work diligently and competently to deliver, as a whole. The parity I've suggested also doesn't presume in advance what the individual's share in the common block would be.

The absurdity of your suggestions to eliminate ESOP considerations are further punctuated by the fact that banking for the common good in very large measure must be about good employment:

That vision calls for such concepts as social justice, fair trade, equity, full employment, decent work, living wages and other matters pertaining to the human dimension of our shared endeavor.

How is it possible to derive "common good" from bad practice? Hence, we are at an impasse.

My suggestion would be to first identify a technology manager to orchestrate the project using subcontractors. Begin with developing a UI (User Interface) Mockup then proceed with the programming. I would start out on the cheap with minimalistic core functions then add additional functionality over time. Without spending a lot of time on the analysis, my hunch is that $250-$500k would be an attainable total budget for the project…I anticipate work could begin immediately and inexpensively at $10-$12k per month plus minimal expenses.

I think 10 programmers seems like a lot to start with and there are plenty of programmers that are willing to work for much less than you are suggesting.

From a project management standpoint, I would concentrate on that mock up of the UI as something to use for fundraising, PR, advertising, etc. I might consider starting with a Drupal platform for the UI and CMS then proceed with development of custom modules to implement whatever specialized security protocols are needed.

One feature of using Drupal as a platform is its ability to manage multi-sites which I think might be important for banks with "branches":

"One feature I should point you to is multi-site: you'll be able to handle all those banks under the same Drupal installation (but not necessarily using the same database"

Depending on your current funding this could be started immediately with just a Project manager, designer and one or two engineers.