Being involved in 2 organisations which use email to contact their members, I did a quick count of the proportion of members for whom I have no email address.
My caving club (Orpheus C. C.) has 12 members out of 105 with no email contact, i.e. about 11.5%. Not a problem to sent the monthly 1-page information Bulletin or Minutes by post to these few. The Newsletter is printed and posted to all.
Out of 47 individual members of DCA, I have no contacts for 7, i.e. nearly 15%. Again, not a problem to send Minutes, Agendas and 4 - 5 Information Circulars per year to these 7. However they do miss out on the quick access updates which are sent out as necessary - sometimes as many as 3 or 4 a month. (All our member clubs have an email contact which we use - but that's not to say how many pass on information to their members.) We post the printed Newsletters to all members but make them available later on our website.
Also, the DCA Individual Membership application form says:
Note that if you give us an email address we would normally expect to use it to send DCA Information Circulars, Minutes and Agendas. Please let us know if you would prefer that we POST these items to you instead. We will always post your copies of ?The Derbyshire Caver?. The DCA Annual Report and the DCA Handbook.
Neither of these organisations has ever run an email poll but, if we ever did such a thing, we would have to post a form to members without an email contact address.
These are vastly different numbers to those BCA is dealing with and, as has been said, there are data protection issues which come into play here which means that BCA has to use the "opt in" system if it wishes to contact all its individual members (whether DIMs or CIMs), directly by email, even when it actually has the email address on record.
Worth noting also that quite a number of people who have an email address still prefer not to use Facebook or Twitter for personal reasons - so perhaps not such a good idea to rely on these as a means of communication.
There is one other issue which has been brought home to me recently - a rapidly deteriorating and intermittent BB connection which leaves me unable to get online for days at time. How many others could be affected in this way and miss out despite having opted in?
Jenny Potts,
DCA Hon. Sec.