Re: EADA relaunch website
Τετάρτη, 17 Ιουνίου 2009 3:44 μμ
Shell, may I just react to your comments on the way you prefer to communicate ("I prefer to receive all comments/suggestions by e-mail so that I have something definite sent to me to act on. I'm afraid I can't check every post on every dance-related Forum so I ask people to contact me.")
I fully understand that there has to be an official contact address so you can ensure everyone can contact you and you can follow the due process. This is the right thing to do in any organization. And you can even say that this the contact point where you can guarantee that any issues your members wish to raise can be picked up and rectified. In other words you provide assurance that anything reaching you that way is properly handled.
In my mind, however this does not mean that you can not get notified or handle communications in any other form officially. In my professional (i.e. work, not dance) experience in large organizations one should try to provide as many touch point with the target community as possible in order to be effective with the communication. If the community has already established communication platforms, try to utilize them as much as possible. No one expects these platforms to be treated as the official, assured way of handling the issues - but if the official representatives are reachable and reactive on these forums, it is a huge success. (note that you can even include these sources of information properly documented and even ISO certified even if they are not always monitored, simply a possible source of information)
So while I can totally understand your reasoning, I believe you are making a mistake by effectively saying that you will not handle issues raised in the forum of the world's most visited dancing website. No one asks you to provide constant official support on these forums. But if you stumble across something that is relevant to your operation, it is good service to your membership if you try to funnel that information into the existing processes and provide responses when you can. It simply makes sense.
For example, the DancesportInfo staff can be officially contacted through the webmaster@dancesportinfo.net Email address and all mails are responded to. We also have a forum setup here for comments and feedback. But we also randomly go to various websites and see comments or notes related to our sites - when we see them, we treat them as relevant to what we do and we try to react to them there. It is not important where the information comes from, only if it is relevant.
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