by slimboyfat 165 Replies latest members private
Due to a lack of good faith financial transparency the Watchtower Corporation charity records are closed from inspection. So we make guesses according to what we see but without any clear documentation.
Will the Watchtower ever volunteer it's records of what's happening to their asset flow? Is it in the red and by how much? Fat chance or by a court order perhaps? Time will tell.
Put it this way, if Wt isn't having financial problems, it is certainly a different organization to the one I grew up in during the 70 - 90s. In the 80s things were booming. New buildings and branches every where across the world. I remember hearing that halls wouldn't be built any smaller than a 250 seater to make way for further expansion. A bethel that was built had one extra wing built, and I believe was never utilised in expectation of growth. Now that bethel has since been sold and many of those congregations that had 250 seaters sold because they either can't fill or cover costs for them.
New buildings and branches every where across the world.
And you could even get a program of the assembly at the door when you went to an assembly - even two or three.
sparky1, so their new business model is:
Lets become 'Slum Lords' and the new 'Golden Age' of real estate cash flow falls into their lap. Now instead of giving mortgages to congregations that can be paid off at will and thereby losing that cash flow, they become a leasing company with PERPETUAL cash flow. Every single building that has the JW.ORG logo attached to it has now become a permanent stream of income.
How is that a business model? It's simply a hope that ordinary JWs will send the organisation money for nothing in return. They found out in 1990 that JWs don't send much money if they are not obligated to do so when the cover price for the literature was dropped. They are repeating the same mistake when they think JWs will send higher donations for KHs with no contractual obligation to do so and with nothing tangible in return. If that's their grand plan for a business model to replace their publishing empire, then good luck! Indeed we should be able to test the idea in Britain over the next few years where charity contributions are on public record. We will see if contributions are up or down as a result of the new arrangement. My prediction is very much that they will be down! This is not a business model it's a programme of self-destruction.
notsurewheretogo, the newspaper industry is very different from book and magazine publishing. The Daily Record used to sell nearly 750,000 copies. It's now down to just 150,000. That's a catastrophic collapse. Most other newspapers are the same:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_United_Kingdom_by_circulation
Book sales on the other hand are rising once again after experiencing a much more modest dip around 2012. There is no reason Watchtower could not have continued as a successful book and magazine publisher, except their own mistake in deciding to no longer charge for their books. This mistake predated the Internet and ebooks.
I think they are in trouble because membership in developed countries is going down, and no hope of stopping the decline. Watchtower is loaded with money and will continue to receive more from the hard-core members through the "rental" of their real estate assets, but that money will keep them going only for so long. In few decades, they will be relegated to a small religion run by true believers. They will be just like those small religious groups which no one has heard of, and only learn about them when we see their name on a sign outside of their church.
SBF- "JWs will send higher donations for KHs with no contractual obligation to do so and with nothing tangible in return. If that's their grand plan for a business model to replace their publishing empire, then good luck!"
There is a limit to how much begging they can do.
They have implemented just about every sort of cash grab they can. Even using reward points!
The answer i think is tithing. Yet they seem to be holding off on tithing. They are half way there, with the pledging arrangment, yet they seem scared of it, or cant seem to find new light for it.
A poster last week said the religions that tithe seem to be doing ok, not sure of how true that is.
Its only a matter of time until they follow the business model of the other religions, as its the only cash source left to exploit.
I think Sparky's view of Watchtower's new business model is the same as, or similar to what Watchtower is hoping for. I don't think it is matched by reality, however.
My guess is that Watchtower actually thought that it would reinvent itself as a religious multimedia company owning halls around the world where everyone would enjoy its religious media productions and contribute accordingly. They obviously decided that paper publishing was not the future, and it appears they thought the way to retain the young was to become internet savvy, replace paper with on-line content, produce a lot of Sophie and Caleb cartoons, etc.
Reality is probably very different, young ones are leaving more than ever, and I suspect the Borg is genuinely running at an operating loss. It is not a mere "cashflow" problem. However, I suspect that the Borg may well have this idea that things will turn around as its membership starts to embrace Borg multimedia more. In fact all the evidence of how the Borg is responding to its financial problems is consistent with this.
Note that to date, the Borg has only sold Kingdom Halls where there is an alternative Kingdom Hall nearby. The Borg still has far too many Bethelites, but has not taken the hard decision to deal with them. It is recently proudly lauding its IT expenditure, which shows that it still has cash to spend, and that it is still serious in its attempt to reinvent itself as a religious multimedia company. It still has about £100 million cash ring-fenced in its U.K. accounts for construction at Chelmsford. All this leads me to think that
(a) the cash hasn't run out yet, and
(b) the Borg thinks (or hopes) it has a temporary problem to ride through.
further to Gone Awol's reply--they could sell pardons!
Tithing would be a solution, but they have the problem that JWs have a long history of not contributing very much compared with other religions. (A legacy of their historic reliance on book and magazine publishing for revenue)
Plus even if the WT convinces JWs that they should contribute more money, because of their low levels of education and career aspiration, they simply don't have as much money to contribute as members of other religions.
Watchtower is in a bind and there's it's not easy to see what the solution could be.
Part 2, please.
