Introduction to our Blog
In this first posting I'm going to talk about communication. It has been suggested often that we should try to improve communication with our members and we have given a lot of thought to how we might manage this.
We send out occasional newsletters, circulated to members for whom we have good contact addresses. We will try to increase the frequency of these, in the meantime, all previous newsletters are available for downloading from this website. Go to the 'Members' pages where they are all listed.
We can also ensure that minutes of our Board meetings are made available to keep members abreast with things we are doing.
One thing which has been a bit of a problem has been the listing of all our members. Historically we had Life and Annual members which involved the collection of subscriptions every year. We proposed a few years ago to change this, making all memberships Life and stopping the Annual memberships. All existing members would become Life members.
We then needed to establish exactly how many members we had, whether we had correct contact information for all and also whether people wished to remain members. Under the General Data Processing Regulations (GDPR) we are required to make membership 'opt-in' which involves making sure that all members confirm their membership. This then raised the question of members responses to our communcications.
To start we had several files listing members details so we had to sort through these to establish the correct number of members. Eventually, we managed to confirm that we had details for about 130 people, about 70 of these were Life members so we started from there. Contact information for these people was variable. Our preferred contact would be by email, as this is quicker and cheaper, but we do not have email addresses for all and quite a few were duplicates where partners used the same address. Similarly with physical addresses there were duplicates.
We finally worked out that using about 65 emails addresses and 12 physical addresses we should be able to contact all the membership. The question then arose of how much feedback we would get. Typically we don't get any feedback to physical contacts. For emails we have been using the MailChimp service to send out what they call 'campaigns'. They can provide statistics for each campaign on numbers. From this we know that response to our emails is not great. For the last newsletter, for instance, 71 emails were sent, 44 of these were opened and 30 clicked to download the newsletter. For the AGM notice, 65 were sent, 42 of these were opened and 13 clicked to download the Special Resolution. So we concluded that response from members is poor.
We would like to establish the views of our membership but also for the wider community. So we are planning to conduct a survey. As part of this we propose to send out a leaflet to all addresses in our RCT catchment with details of a questionnaire. We have obtained a list of all addresses within our catchment, amounting to 319. The question now is how do we distribute these, and we have yet to finally decide. The survey will also become available on our website for completion on-line or for download.
Finally, just a comment on FaceBook. Some members of the Board have Facebook accounts and follow the postings on RhynieOnline, but not all. Some of us are not aware of discussions there and are not able to follow.
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