Thursday, 27 September 2007

For any CVS, membership renewals are a perennial nightmare. All our members needed to renew in April 2007. One group (long-standing CVS members) we have now e-mailed five times and telephoned three times all for a £15 membership fee. I am sure they will rejoin sooner or later, but meanwhile they called today and still want detailed advice on a rather delicate internal matter. What should we do?

Vanessa (our Development and Training Officer) has a much expanded workload and she is currently chasing down about twenty hares that I’ve set running. One of these hares is to book both of us on the Charity Evaluation Service’s PQASSO training. A while ago, Vanessa said that CES’s enrolment form requested far too much information, including from our strategic plan. Today, Vanessa discovered that the enrolment form is only available as an uneditable pdf file, so both our forms have to be completed in long hand with old fashioned pen and ink. Vanessa was indignant at this inefficiency, despite not usually being good IT Champion material. But Vanessa is perfect Excellence Champion material so of course she would not simply accept the situation. She challenged CES. And then she was told that the form could not be made available for editing as people kept forgetting to sign them. Vanessa asked me, “do we really want to do business with these people?” and although I secretly found the situation hilarious I knew Vanessa was right. But then, mercifully, someone at CES saw sense and mailed Vanessa an editable version of the form. Another triumph for Vanessa and for Watford CVS.

I had a lesson from Helen in erecting the Volunteer Centre’s stand as I am “doing a conference” on Saturday at the Colloseum - the launch event for the Watford Community Housing Trust. The stand all works very smoothly and I rather enjoyed it. In the afternoon I attended a meeting of the steering group for the Guidepost Trust’s research project on access to Mental Health services.

And then I worked into the evening proofing our long-awaited and soon-to-be-published Directory of Community organisations. I finally left the office about 10:00 pm. But I still had to drop by to see if the Comet Hotel in Hatfield is a suitable venue for our February 2008 county-wide trustees conference.