Thursday, 8 February 2007

Snowbound but prescient

Two weeks ago, I chose today as a day I’d work from home. It was a good choice as by 7:00 am about five inches of snow had settled. Ken, our decrepit cat was very disconcerted.

Our house lies at the bottom of a bowl-shaped depression and the two roads away from our house are possibly the steepest roads in Hertfordshire. Both were solid sheets of ice. But Jackie was determined to get to work and she wrapped herself up and after a quick kiss from me she strode off into the wilderness.

CapacityBuilders

Wiping a tear from my eye, I settled myself down and sorted my in-tray into a piles: a pile of stuff to read, a pile of stuff to pass on, a pile of stuff needing more work, and a pile to recycle. The reading pile looked most interesting: four back-issues of Third Sector, the CapacityBuilders strategic plan to 2014, several papers from WBC, and the interim report of the Third Sector Review. I had to get up to speed on this stuff so spent a quiet six hours reading and digesting everything. Overall, the CapacityBuilders strategy placed them worryingly close to being merely a government agency, and worryingly close to duplicating the work of established bodies - and potentially competing with them for funds. But I expect this will all work itself out in time.

Jackie managed to find her way into work and back – what a hero. But from a call to the office I gather that only three out of eleven people made it in for WCVS’s managing conflict course. The big question is do we offer a refund? On one hand: all WCVS staff and the trainer managed to travel in; Jackie made it right across WGC and back; we advised everyone who called that the course was going ahead and WCVS has incurred quite some costs. On the other hand, there was a bit of snow and a "severe weather warning" and doubtless people were advised not to travel unless it was “absolutely necessary”. I can remember when ... but what's the use?

CVS membership forms

In the evening, my biggest priority was to design a proper membership system and membership form following the decisions of my trustees last week. This turned out to be quite a task.

WCVS membership is around 150. We are inviting 400 Watford groups to join us free for 2007, and asking them to sign a bank mandate for future year membership fees. We have to use this mailing to sell ourselves and explain what we can do to help. The trouble is that we also need to collect data from groups (turnover, membership, spheres of interest, etc) to feed into our new Volbase database.

Without exception all existing membership forms I’ve seen (from WCVS and from other CVSs) are soulless bureaucratic and interrogative: they are the little brothers and sisters to the forms you had to fill out in the 1960s to apply for a visa to visit East Germany.

So I started from scratch, trying to make the forms as easy and attractive as possible. I’m not sure I succeeded, but I quite liked the end result.

This process also confirmed that we need to move fast now to open up our new bank accounts – people can’t sign a bank mandate to us if we can't give them the account details!