Around
May of 2012, I was an Inventor Member of the UIA, a post had come to my email
looking for volunteers for the UIA, I
volunteered and shortly after received a phone call from Mark Reyland, Mark
offered various tasks and offered to pay me for those tasks on a per task basis, I worked for the UIA for almost a year, My
first “Official Title” was Volunteer Coordinator, During that time I was still
doing the work and research on the Inventors Rights Act of 1999. Prior to this I had no writing experience
that would qualify my to re write any legislative document.
When I
first got involved with this I did not know a lot about the UIA, I was simply a
Member who had signed up a short time before, and wanted to volunteer to help,
from my understanding, the UIA was supposed to be a place where inventors could
go to get help from quality and trusted companies, other resources were
available, to help inventors become successful.
While I did not know a whole lot about the UIA, Mark Reyland pushed that
it’s all about teaching inventors, later more derogatory terms were used, but I
will get into the later.
Mark
had met with me and I shared with him my invention, in which he thought was
great, so did everyone I showed it to, but still do date I have no great
success story to tell from any invention, even now why Mark thought I had any
qualifications to do any of these Jobs I really do not know, maybe because I
showed an interest, looking back, maybe because I would be easy to manipulate. With the Director, of Corporate Membership
services, looking back and seeing the emails, I was really pushed into this
job, almost goaded into taking the Job, that I KNEW I was not qualified for. This is part of an email I received when I
was being asked to take the job
“Really….are you scared of this level of job?
because if you are I'm going to make fun of you forever :)“
I am an inventor who to date has
never brought a product to market, I had no experience in any of the positions
I did with the UIA, I had to teach myself just about everything , when I had
questions I would email them to mark for clarification, It is my opinion it was
my level of interest in inventing or looking back now, an easy victim, I was
never asked for any work history, references, or anything like that, I struggled with the decision to take the
offer and had many discussions with my wife about it, I feared I could not do
the job as described, Mark finally talked me into taking the position, and I
jumped in head first not knowing what I was doing. I was simply a UIA member trying help people.
Then is when I learned how the corporate membership programs worked,
Patron Membership 500.00 per year with no ROI, a small business platinum
Membership 3000.00 per year included 2
emails per year to advertise to the UIA members, and one blog a month, and a
Platinum Membership which hekd the same ROI as the Small business platinum
Membership5000.00 per year. In many
cases even a large company could sign up for the 3000.00 membership it was said
that its better to get 3000.00 from them than nothing at all. So even those
“rules” were not enforced.
In a
couple cases the UIA allowed companies to “pay to play” for emailing the UIA
community, on one such case, Inventions Geneva was charged $500, for a patron
membership and paid an additional $500.00 for the UIA to advertise their event.
We sent out two emails for Inventions Geneva for the additional $500.
In the
second case, Ron Docie signed up for a Patron membership and was allowed to
advertise his services to the UIA community.
No other Patron member was afforded this opportunity unless it was where
I asked them to send me something for a blog post thanking our patron members.
Certain
trades were made with companies to exchange services for sponsorship, Fargo
Design, and a radio station both had services trade agreements. Trade a
membership from the UIA for their services.
It
wasn’t till all this started that I realized that even the telling the
corporate sponsors we were emailing at this point almost 14,000 members, the
fact of the matter is really this well that’s not quite the truth either, you
see almost 14,000 is the member count, but what they don’t tell you when they
send out the emails is the some 5000 of those who have opted out of receiving
emails from the UIA, and it doesn’t tell you of the 2000 to 3000 errors it gets
from people signing up with fake, or improper emails, so how many out of almost
14,000 wind up actually getting an email, if my memory recalls somewhere
between 6000 and 7000 that actually receive the email, and then add the bounce
backs that came to my email, either the email for that person had changed,
required verification, unknown delivery recipient, so the number may be even
less than that.
To be continued......
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