[Businessmtg] Welcome booklet

[Lynne]

I really appreciate Jerry’s and Tori’s offer of earmarked donations, but I don’t think we have any process at ASP to accept earmarked donations. We don’t have a separate way to track them, a separate bank account to put them in and have no SOPs for dealing with it. And considering we do not have an elected Treasurer, I would be very wary of adding additional jobs/responsibilities to that position.

But beyond that, why are we stuck on giving these electronic welcome booklets to newcomers? I understand the F2F process with paper copies of things is to give newcomers a packet. But is buying gift copies of the welcome booklet the best solution for our electronic group? 

As Steve mentioned, it opens a lot of cans of worms that we would have to deal with. The money is only one of them - and likely the easiest to solve as evidenced by the generous offers. 

This welcome ebook is available to purchase as a gift at 4 different retailers - Amazon, Apple, Android and Barnes & Noble. 

1. Would the greeters offer newcomers this ebook and then ask which format they could use? If so, then who would purchase the gift? The treasurer does not currently have access to the bank debit card. Only the founders do. Would the greeter have to ask a founder to buy the ebook gift each and every time a newcomer took the greeter up on the offer of this book? I’m sorry, that is not realistic. So to me that is out. 

2. Would we stick with only one vendor and then purchase a bulk amount of gift books? Ok, say we chose Amazon and the founder bought 20 gift copies of this book and gave the gift code/links to the greeter chair. So a greeter offers this book, a newcomer accepts and the greeter asks the greeter chair for a gift code/link and the greeter chair sends it to the greeter for distribution. First, this does add complexity to the greeter process, so I would defer to Jennifer and the greeters as to whether that is realistic. But even if it were realistic, what about people who can’t use an Amazon gift code or live outside of the US, as gift codes only work for US residents. Well then those newcomers would be out of luck and would have to purchase it for themselves if they want it. So I don’t like this either because it means we are saying - here is a great book that we want you to have, but you can only have it if you live in the US and use a specific vendor. That doesn’t seem fair. So I would be against this too. We should be able to give it to everyone who wants it or to no one. 

I honestly can’t see a way to make this work. So even though I love the intent, I don’t think this is viable to be executed at ASP at this time. 

So then I come back to Steve’s suggestion of repealing motion 7. And adding a link to the welcome booklet in the greeter email exchange AND putting a link on our website somewhere so anyone interested can know it is there. That is realistic and I think the best option we have to honor the intent of making sure newcomers have access to this material. 

Hugs,
Lynne

Sent from my iPhone