Development Group Report 2015 10
Freegle Development Report
September/ October 2015
The development group has grown a little this month with membership now standing at 43 members up 2 members from the end August report. September has seen some interesting discussions mostly to do with publicity and media.
Members: 43
Task 16: - Local press releases
The discussion continued from August and Jacky suggested putting a team together to create some sample press releases for all groups to use. No volunteers have come forward so far.
Recruiting publicity volunteers
A continuation of the discussion of local press releases, the topic has moved to recruiting volunteers for local publicity. The feeling is that not all mods are into the PR side of Freegle and it may be good for groups to recruit people specifically to deal with the compilation of guidance and national resources. If groups can recruit locally the hope is that eventually some of those people would want to help nationally with PR.
The idea of recruiting publicity volunteers on groups still needs further discussion and a proper policy laid out regarding how to train volunteers. Dominic from Petersfield took on the task of setting out guidelines for what would be required and some info has been added to the wiki to help group owners to recruit volunteers .
A poll was held and it was agreed that the idea should be taken to Central to recommend the idea of local media volunteers.
The discussion has progressed into press releases. We are discussing how we can encourage Groups to make more use of the national press releases to promote Freegle.
It was suggested we need a national support officer to help local volunteers to make contacts with waste authorities and to run events.
Cat posted a press release for the £32K won by Freegle in the recent microsoft competition and an article published by her local paper.
The discussion is ongoing.
Caretaker rules
The proposed caretaker rules were brought to Development by Mentors and a few suggestions were made for alterations and corrections. The edited version will be brought back when completed.
Voluntary Disaffiliation Process
Development were informed that a Group Owner had requested that their groups be disaffiliated from Freegle. Development have been asked to discuss creating a process for groups to leave Freegle if they wish to.
It was noted that there is already a disaffiliation process on the wiki - Disaffiliation Procedure
This process was decided to be adequate for the purpose, although discussion went on to clarify that a list of FD members would be given to the leaving Group Owner so they could invite the members to join the Yahoo group before the group was deleted from FD.
Social media volunteers
Edward brought an admin to Development created to recruit volunteers to do the media work, that groups could use. Jacky had also done one which had been added to the wiki. Edward will get the two combined to make them a regional rather than national admin.
If you can add anything to any of these discussions, the Development group would be happy for you to join and have your say. https://uk.groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FreegleDevelopment/info
Development Working Group Team
Links: