I wrote the following comments in a response to joelbear's thread on the 4 steps to the new system. But they were sort of off topic there, and I thought they might be of interest as a separate thread. So here goes: At one time, door to door work was highly effective. In the early days of the WTS, all sorts of business was done through door to door sales. Even when I was a kid, we had milkmen, bread men, ice men (to bring ice for the pre-refrigerator ice box) and numerous others coming to the house on a regular basis. In the 1940's and 1950's, the Fuller Brush Man was an icon of American consumerism, and a really good job to have - a Fuller Brush Man who worked at it and knew what he was doing might well earn three times what a factory worker made.
Alas, the world has changed. Crime has become more widespread and its nature more hideous. We are now suspicious and afraid of strangers who knock on our doors. Moreover, we have become more assertive of privacy rights. When I was young, I thought nothing of dropping in on my friends uninvited, and they felt the same way about me. Now, I would rarely if ever go to someone else's house without an appointment. People are also much busier now, they are home a lot less and far less inclined to be hospitable to an uninvited stranger when they are home.
Because of all these factors, businesses have gotten away from door to door sales. Now, instead of a barrage of several strangers knocking at the door each day (as I recall when I was a child), the only ones left making unsolicited calls at private homes are religious proselytizers - and they are generally unwelcome. Therefore, what once may have been an effective method of getting the message out has become a parody, fodder for comedians. Yet, rather than recognize the changes in society and change their methods in order to meet the new market conditions, as any good businessman would do, the WTS continues to plod along using the same old methods that don't work anymore. Why?
I guess the main reason is that, no matter how ineffective the work is, it costs them nothing. All expense is borne by the "publishers". To switch to any other more effective method (radio and TV spring right to mind) would cost the WTS its own money. What difference does it make if it takes 8000 hours of "field service" to produce one baptism, when they are paying nothing for the hours and likely receiving donations along the way?
But now they have a problem, in that service is also waning. Publishers are less enthusiastic about going out, and less concerned with being effective when they do. Many, many hours are recorded in donut shops. The object has become to maximize time counted with the least possible effort. I even see a JW bot now in Yahoo chat rooms - a bot is a fake screen name that delivers an automated message. This particular bot usually has a name like "Vital Info" and posts a message that says "Vital info - something everyone should know about - check my profile." When you go to the profile, there are links to articles on the WTS website. The bot goes from chat room to chat room delivering its automated message, and I have no doubt that whoever is running this bot is sitting there counting the hours as it runs.
Anyway, I suspect that the long term future will see a change of some sort, though I don't know what it might be. Perhaps the WTS will produce radio or TV shows and ask local congregations to sponsor them. The key will certainly be to find some form of spreading the message that costs the organization little or nothing to distribute widely.