MAR

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Ian Curtis

Eric, since you are not even close to the target group, does it make much sense that you would have been hit with MAR informational minutes or information? Perhaps another rookie team could comment on how that has actually happened, and it would be much more useful to the MAR planning committee. Finally starting with "X, just a little hint." sounds pretty condescending to me. Even if someone was giving me the best advice in the world, if it was delivered like that I'm not sure I would listen.

Ian, I gave an example. No, I'm not in the area. I never asked to be involved; if I had wanted to be, I wouldn't have had much of an idea how to get involved. But let's say that CA (or some other area I'm in) starts a district system up. Let's say that I'm in the target area, with a team (a bit of a stretch). Now, if it's something I need/want to know about, like planning meetings, and I don't know about it for whatever reason, I'm not going to be too thrilled months later when I look and all I know about is one meeting--and I find out that there were a bunch of others, and didn't know the contact info or anything for involvement. That not-thrilled-ness is going to be directed towards wherever the communication break happened--or where I see the break happening, which may not be the same place.

That was my point. I've been following this thread today, and it just seems like the folks that are active in MAR are assuming that their information on how to be involved with planning and meetings and all that made it to everybody. This information is incorrect, or was...but operating under the assumption that everyone who wants to be involved has information on how to get involved is not ideal.

Flyers at events, assuming both that they have the information needed to get involved and that they are distributed appropriately, do have a tendency to end up in piles of paperwork or in the trash or buried in someone's bag. Email, though better, can still break down, as shown here. Hey, maybe a post on CD about "Hey, we're forming X group, here's how to get involved" would work--but I didn't exactly see that info in a post. Definitely a good effort, now that I hear what they did. Team communication breakdowns are not the fault of the organization. Just maybe a general announcement via some non-email communication might have been a really good idea.

Ian, I'll be editing that part about "hint" out of my original post. I apologize if anyone took that the wrong way. I just tend to get rather irritated about communication breakdowns--the more critical the communicated information, the more irritated I get.