Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Transition Bellingen News - review of frequency and content

Dear TB supporter.

We would love your feedback on something that is perplexing us.

We have had an increasing amount of requests from various groups and individuals in our community to pass on notifications of various meetings, events, and causes via this email list. We are beginning to be a little bit challenged by all these requests, as we feel that you signed up to our mailing list in order to hear specifically about Transition events, and we don't want to flood your inbox with emails.

Perhaps you have noticed that you ordinarily receive one email from us per week, usually on a Friday - which lists first all events connected directly to Transition Bellingen, and then other events. We have tried to limit these other events by using the following criteria: (1) 
local initiatives that will help make our community more resilient in the face of shocks such as peak oil, climate change and financial crisis, and (2)  initiatives from community-based, not-for-profit groups whose work is relevant to this goal, and that do not publicise commercial or party political initiatives.

But it often more complicated than that. Here is an example:  we received a request to urgently publicise an event on Lyme Disease which was happening before the next issue of our newsletter . Do we send it out at all - it is local and it is non-profit and it is about resilience, albeit not directly connected to climate change, etc. Do we send it out immediately or don't we? Well, in this case we are being creative - we are sending out the notification  - but we are also taking the opportunity to ask for your feedback about what you think about this.

Specifically:
(1) Do you want TB emails to be specifically about TB connected events, or do you want us to continue to include notifications of other events that fit our criteria as listed above?
(2) Would you prefer getting an email from us once a week, or would you mind  getting more emails from us mid-week if necessary?
(3) Do you have any comment on our criteria as listed above?

If you have gotten this far, thanks for reading - we look forward to hearing back from you with whatever you have to say.

Yours, in the spirit of transition,

David and Lisa, on behalf of the Transition Bellingen hub