TOPIC:

I was told that I cannnot reply to the email and I should turn to the forum. I wanted to keep this more private, but ok, per the automated reply on my email, here it is.

To make a long story short, an email went out to myself (as admin and VP-PR) of the site which was also copied to officers. I had lobbied hard to make FreeToastHost as our platform, it was accepted by the club by only a narrow margin. Years ago. Imagine my surprise when I received a mass email reminding me that we have a platform. What? I have been updating it every two weeks. This is insulting.

Since I received an email "reject" message to take it to this site, here it is.

Regards, *Birgit

My response (please scroll for the original email):
Hello Brian and Steve,

I would ask you to check your statistics. Copying other club officers on this email makes it sound as if I am not fulfilling my responsibilities, which cannot be further from the truth. I have already been approached by new members who were just elected officers, and I do not appreciate having to justify my on-going activity on the site for many years because of a thoughtless generic email.

Our club meets every two weeks, therefore the site is updated at least every two weeks with the meeting theme. The next update will be this evening, as I have just received the next theme. I have seen positive changes in the site's capabilities. That being said, you are obviously not monitoring usage correctly, or you took the easy way out with a generic email. Your email makes it sound as if I am not even aware that we have a site.

You may want to target these emails more carefully, we preach that we should know our audience, and this email is an insult given that I have heavily used FreeToastHost even though it is certainly not the most user-friendly platform I have encountered.

Best,
*Birgit


Birgit Starmanns, DTM
Producer, Toastmasters Bay to Bay cable access show
VP of Public Relations, Evening Stars
Web: www.d4tm.org/Newsroom/bay2bay.php

Birgit,

I think you are misinterpreting the intent of the email, which was simply to reconnect with our users via email. It was not intended to be negative or insulting in any way. Brian used to send out a mass email about every six months, but the mass mail function was broken when FTH 2.2 was released. I just fixed it over the last couple of weeks, so this email is just a way to re-start something we were doing periodically in the past. In the interim, I have been posting admin login messages about system updates, but those are more limited, and require that the admin actually log in.

If you have suggestions for how we can improve our communications, please let us know.