NEW BUSINESS: 15b. Member Volunteers Discussion (Bob Armstrong)

[Lyle Craver]

OK Bob - go for it!

[Bob Armstrong]

Item 14b. – New Business - Member Volunteers Discussion (Bob Armstrong)

The 1800 some odd members of the CFC should be a great resource pool for the CFC to draw on.

But the reality is that most members are passive, and not that interested in chess administration. I feel that part of the reason for this is that the CFC doesn’t aggressively and publicly have a volunteer recruitment campaign, that clearly lets everyone know how open and accepting we are to volunteers. I am not criticizing the CFC for not being open to volunteers – I think administrations consistently have been – but the members/public don’t know this, or feel that it is a very low priority for CFC. As long as this impression persists, there will be no member volunteers.

Of course, with this would come the necessity of giving the volunteers some real power of contributing to decision-making. This is the carrot that often brings volunteers in – that they will actually get a real chance to influence the course of operation of an organization.

For example, I think an excellent place for member volunteers would be on the Membership Drive Committee, and the Long-Term Planning Committee. As far as I know, there are no ordinary members on these committees. I’m sure the Chairpersons are open to this, and may actually have given some public indication of openness. But I feel that the whole CFC must be more pro-active on this file!

Should CFC recruit more volunteers into administration?
Is the current CFC volunteer recruitment effort sufficient?
If new ideas are needed on this, what do you think CFC needs to do?

Bob A

[Kevin Pacey]

When it comes to inviting non-Governors onto CFC committees, we might have to consider this on a committee by committee basis.

For example, at the moment my committee's function has (for the time being at least) been simplified to sending emails to a list of ex-CFC members, asking them to rejoin. This task was divided up three ways, since there are three committee members, each of whom were willing to do roughly a third of the emails.

Our list of 2167 names is over 80% finished, as far as sending out emails, so for what's left of the rest of this term in my view there would not be much to be gained by adding more committee members (then there is the perhaps non-trivial question of whether we would entrust non-Governors to seeing the office's list of ex-CFC members' email addresses).

I also have this view because the CFC's current advertising budget is nil still, and the CFC can't afford to increase that substantially enough, in my view, unless we have a sudden influx of cash available, which probably could only happen if the CFC asked for and received a loan from the Foundation for funding for advertising.

Without advertising funding, there is not much else a membership drive committee can do besides emailing ex-CFC members, it would seem to me. Perhaps if sufficient funds for a more proper membership drive (i.e. to the general public) do become available, a future Membership Drive Committee may well be able to use substantially more committee members, even non-Governors.

After the committee's work is done this term, it may be a number of terms before the office has a substantially different enough body of ex-CFC members' names and email addresses, in order to make a similar emailing membership drive as this year's worth doing again, I would also note.

Kevin Pacey
CFC Membership Drive Committee Chairman