Tuesday, 19 August 2008

I arrived in Watford early and spent some time tidying up various parts of mywatford.net. At last, I now have a clear idea of how the template site should look and I need to spend some time with Angelo working this through. At 10:00 I had another mywatford.net workshop. Again the internet connection was tortuously and painfully slow so we abandoned the “hands on” part of the workshop. But for what it’s worth I am at least now convinced that there is nothing fundamentally wrong at our end of the connection.

After a short visit to the CVS office, I walked over to the Town Hall to meet with our Mayor, Dorothy Thornhill. We covered a lot of ground in our hour-long chat about the needs of the local voluntary sector.

I left Watford at 3:30, still with no news on the award of the HCC LINks contract. On my way home, I had to drop off a Fundraising Toolkit for Kate Belinis at Herts CDA in Hatfield. Herts CDA had also put in a bid for the HCC LINks contract.

When I arrived at Herts CDA, Kate asked: “Have you had an e-mail from HCC about LINks?” She asked in such a way as to indicate that she had received such an e-mail.

“Is it good news?” I asked, with an unspoken “… for either of us?” But by the time I had stumbled out the question, I had already seen the answer on Kate’s face and heard it in her voice. HCC wanted to appoint someone with strong connections in Hertfordshire’s communities; so they have appointed the Shaw Trust in preference to bids from Herts CDA and Herts CVS. Go figure (as I believe the Americans say).

The task now is to get clear feedback from HCC on where we went wrong (and / or where and why our bid was marked down) so we can at least learn some lessons from this exercise.