The Open Rights Group, the UK’s equivalent of the EFF, is a great thing. However, and I hope I won’t upset Becky too much by saying this, their organisation leaves much to be desired.
I wanted to make sure I was supporting them. So on 21st May 2007, I sent this email to supporters@:
Have I ever and/or am I currently supporting ORG financially? If so, in what way?
Gerv
No response. A month later, on the 20th June, I tried again:
Hey,
Don’t you want my money? :-) If you tell me I’m not currently supporting ORG, I intend to.
Gerv
Still nothing. At LUGRadio Live, I found Becky Hogge (who runs it) and she said she’d get it sorted, and I should email again. So, on the 27th of July:
Despite having buttonholed Becky Hogge about it at LUGRadio Live, I still haven’t heard definitively whether or not I’m an ORG supporter.
I still want to give you guys money if I’m not already! Please help me! :-)
Gerv
As of today, still no response :-( I’ve had this problem before. I’m very happy to support them once, but I don’t want to do so twice. What do I have to do to get them to talk to me?
[Update 2007-11-03: Just noticed that my amusing punning title, “DisORGanised”, doesn’t work using my blog’s default stylesheet in Firefox, which respects the text-transform: upper-case I use for titles. So it just looks like a bald insult. Sorry about that, ORG :-) ]
>> What do I have to do to get them to talk to me?
I guess all you have to do is blog about it – hi Gervase!
You’ve made a good call with this post – and thanks for putting your grievances in the public domain so I can answer them publicly.
The Open Rights Group hasn’t been as organised as I would have liked us to be in letting our supporters know that we have received their money safe and well, or that we haven’t, and we want to. Part of this has to do with the fact that we hit the ground running on the campaign front, and all our resources have been put into trying to do the work we set out to do. A common mistake of many non-profit, supporter-based groups, or so I’m told.
But we realised early on this year that that situation had to change – not only is it unintentionally rude, its also not in the long-term interests of ORG and its supporters. It’s taken us a while to get the right systems in place, but last month, we began emailing all the people whose financial support for ORG has lapsed in the two years since we started as an organisation. This month we’ll be getting in contact with all the people who signed our original pledge (http://www.pledgebank.com/rights), and/or signed up to support us on our website, but never got around to it.
But you won’t be hearing from us during this round of housekeeping, Gervase, since I can confirm you are indeed a fully paid-up supporter of the Open Rights Group – I wouldn’t normally announce this about people publicly, but I’ll make an exception since you’ve made your intentions public.
If anyone else reading this is unsure whether they are supporting ORG, please email me direct (becky _AT_ openrightsgroup.org). Or, you can always blog about it…
Oh, and I’m investigating why your supporters@ emails never got through to us.
Fantastic :-) Thanks very much. It’s great to hear that this is a known problem in the process of being fixed. Onward and upward to greater things! :-)