Several people have correctly noted that the newsletter was not emailed to our members.
As many of you know, our webmaster has recently taken over many of the jobs associated to administering the IT side of BCA functions, including membership systems. It might come as no surprise, that he found the systems in place need some improvement. Although all data is of course secure, the systems rely extensively on manual intervention to update details.
Since November, a number of individual members have contacted us to specifically request not to receive further email communications. I believe the problem is that lots of CIMs don?t know they are BCA members because their membership is administered by their club, and the BCA membership fee is bundled into club membership costs.
This has identified a wider issue; are all clubs getting consent to give BCA their member email details?
It has also been identified that due to the current systems there is a risk that one of these individuals who have ?opted out? could easily get missed, e.g. if their email goes to junk or gets missed due to human error (there is a lot of email traffic for an organisation with >6000 members, so easy to miss a single email). This could result in further emails being sent to that member. Some of these people were already quite angry about receiving emails from the BCA; so receiving further emails after asking not to would likely result in serious complaints.
We therefore have no choice but to discontinue membership emails just for now.
In my eyes, the way forward is that all BCA members should join directly (i.e. DIM), so that the membership interaction is direct, and we can be sure that member consent is in place. If you were designing an organisation such as the BCA from scratch today, it would seem very unusual to enable people to join via a middle-man (i.e. a club) rather than directly. This would need restructuring of the entire BCA, not only constitutionally, but also to make getting BCA membership for DIMs much easier, such as allowing auto-renewal/direct debits for those who want this, as well as to make the workload for our membership team manageable. This is a discussion for the longer term future though. For now we need to work with the CIM/DIM structure.
We are aware that the status quo is not ideal. Over the coming months, there is going to be a lot of work behind the scenes to remedy this situation and phase in new systems that should resolve most of the above issues and allow us to get back to email communication with our members. A discussion on potential ways forward is planned for the upcoming 4th April BCA Council meeting. Until then, the BCA will be relying on social media, our website (www.british-caving.org.uk), new version due to launch soon, and of course, here on UKCaving to communicate with everyone.
Therefore, sorry that the newsletter has not been emailed out on this occasion, but please bear with us, and support those who are working extremely hard (many voluntary hours each week) to make things better.
Matt Ewles
BCA Secretary