Sign I think PFC is broken #3
Sign #3 - When outside of the coop, members are rarely if ever contacted. The contact members have with PFC outside of the coop is limited to two things, a sales flyer and a bi-monthly newsletter. To the extent of the sales flyer, I'm being courted just as strongly by Kroger, Meijers, and Best Buy, so that hardly counts as a member contact. In regard to the newsletter, that may raise to the level of its own separate sign of brokenness. The newsletter is being used right now as a marketing tool rather than a communication tool to owners of a business, and is a very passive marketing tool at that. It is the very passivity of the communication between PFC and its members that is the strongest sign to me of how broken PFC is.
There exists, supposedly, an online forum for members to communicate with each other and with the management. If you log in to it using "guest" as both your username and password, you will see the level of activity that it generates. This is from a forum which has a link right off of the homepage of People's Food Coop. Yet, in the last board meeting I attended in June, a high priority of the board is for such an online forum to be encouraged. The board members and Carol Collins were too busy fighting with each other over who had responsibility for implementing it to discuss the efficacy of the existing system.
There exists, supposedly, an online forum for members to communicate with each other and with the management. If you log in to it using "guest" as both your username and password, you will see the level of activity that it generates. This is from a forum which has a link right off of the homepage of People's Food Coop. Yet, in the last board meeting I attended in June, a high priority of the board is for such an online forum to be encouraged. The board members and Carol Collins were too busy fighting with each other over who had responsibility for implementing it to discuss the efficacy of the existing system.
posted by Solomon at 9:33 AM
1 Comments:
one of the nice things about coops is that members can take initiative about things, just like this blog replaces the non-existent efforts of the board to organize an online forum for co-opers.
It would be interesting to do an in-person meetup about this (i.e. a meeting of co-opers but not run by the board) to talk about online efforts, happy to try to find a time to do that.
Ed (member #7409)
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