The Update Forum is a new quarterly event for us to get some insight about what our beneficiaries might want to see, talk to people about what they think of us and space for us to actively tell them what’s going on, what to expect for the next period and where we’re at.
We started with our welcomes and ensured that everyone who had registered could access, hear, and see my presentation, and knew that there was a specific Q&A function within the meeting, as I’d used Microsoft Teams rather than our usual Google Meet.
Then I discussed the purpose of the event, outlined the agenda, and then proceeded to the points for the update part of the meeting.
Points discussed:
Office move
We talked about the upcoming office move, the plan for dates, and the central location of the office (near the playhouse)
I explained that there are some steps to enter, but once you’re in, it’s flat between the boardroom and the toilet.
It’s air conditioned!
We’ll work on getting a ramp, but it’s not as simple as popping to B&Q and buying something, because there will be specific measurements to take. It’s not something to risk or cheap out on. Still, we do have access to book facilities at our old office space, Concord Business Centre, which is fully accessible, so if we needed a fully accessible venue, we have that at our disposal.
In-person socials back
We talked about the return of in-person socials after the office move and when we’re all settled in.
We’ve rebranded the team to the Outreach team rather than the Social Tea, because Outreach is a bit more encompassing of what they do.
We explained the change to the team structure, where we have a dedicated lead (or team) for each event or event category – wellbeing, creative, gaming and community, which should also help us facilitate more one-off socials.
I also explained that we’ll be reaching out to be more proactive for feedback and reviews after events, so that when we come to do our impact monitoring for grant funding, we have a library of stuff we can pull from to make sure that when we get funding, we have qualitative data and testimonials we can use to tell our funders what outcomes we’re chasing.
We can also use this data to help us determine whether or not events went as planned, because it’s not always possible to know unless someone tells us.
The Next 3 months
July – office move begins, we have an end-of-July date. We’re setting the outreach team up for success in training them on what’s expected from them/their role. We’re also at Nottingham Pride. We’re bringing back our online socials with the Wellbeing Check-in, Gather Town and possibly more.
August – settling into the new office, we’re having a launch party (exact date TBC but watch out on our social media), and in-person socials will return in that month for things like games night and creative and peer support, which will also be a hybrid meeting rather than only in person.
September – will see business as usual, settled into our new normal and continuing with in-person socials and events and operating as expected.
September is also our next Update Forum.
Q&A
Can we have more hybrid events?
Yes, we’d love to, peer support is coming back as a hybrid event once we’ve got to grips with the conferencing tech in the new building. We’re meant to be getting some pretty fancy conferencing equipment, so we can have properly hybrid meetings where you’re clearly heard across the room, no matter where you’re sitting.
After the event as I type this up, I did think – this may make it difficult if you do not wish to be on webcam, as the software will focus on the person speaking, but we will test the system and advise accordingly on the event details with what we’ve found,
I think our creative person David is interested in doing some things which will lend themselves to online really well – we’ve talked in the past about him doing some creative writing workshops and things so that’ll be great
Are socials going to keep going up? Can this be changed?
I started by responding to explain that we had the hardship places available but as I was explaining, the questioner mentioned speaking to Claire, our CEO who’d advised we have had to pause this offering temporarily. I’m just returning from Annual Leave, I hadn’t seen that we’d stopped this offering so apologised.
I apologised and explained regarding pricing that we sadly weren’t in a position to keep them where they were as we were making a loss. Usually we just offset that loss when we received grant funding. It’s not about profit it’s about not losing money and trying to break even.
I explained the cost breakdown in general terms as follows:
If we pay our outreach team £12.50 per hour (or whatever it is because we’re a real living wage accredited organisation) and each “shift” that covers an event is 3 hours long, to allow for setup and pack away, and we’re paying 3 people to staff an event, it’s in the region of £100 for us to pay out, not considering extra costs like venue hire, or materials and equipment. If we’re getting grant funding, it doesn’t matter what tickets bring in because the event is covered, but when we’re not getting grant funding, we can’t, we have to not lose money else it’s not viable for us to continue. While we don’t have official ratios to consider like childcare or care homes, we usually aim for 2 staff members for events attended by up to 10 people and 3 staff members when we hit 12-15 attendees, and if we start getting 16/17 people, we’ll be looking at staffing events with 4 people because we want to make sure there’s enough people to make sure everyone attending is comfortable.
So it’s not about profit, it’s the fact that everything is going up for us, and we’re not getting the grant funding we usually use to subsidise events.
Will the calendar be updated with clearer scheduling information for events?
Yes, we’re constantly updating and tweaking templates and ways we communicate stuff to our beneficiaries.
We don’t currently have an outreach coordinator, so Jo’s doing her best to corral the admin team into making sure things happen to where and when they’re supposed to but she’s still learning the processes herself, so, it’s a work in progress but hopefully there’s going to be visible improvement sooner than later.
Will there be more reminders or prompts about upcoming events, especially shared in Discord, to help people like me who are forgetful?
Yes, now Jo’s more comfortable with Discord, she can help us prompt. Like with the templates and ways we do things, the schedule for prompts is one of them. We currently remind people that events happen a week before and on the day of, on social media, but we’ll review that and try and add another point in.
For social media like Facebook and Instagram, we’re at the whim of the algorithms, so while we’re doing our best with that, social media is a little unpredictable, but we’ll review and probably tweak the schedule for reminders for Discord.
For events like the Casual, will announcements include clearer deadlines for things like ticket sales?
We were just trying that – having a cut-off point to help the staff running the event, because they’ve been having problems with the wifi in the function room, we’ve been exporting a list of attendees from the customers so that the staff have everyones details regardless of if there’s been internet and I wanted to make sure that if anyone hadn’t brought a ticket, they would have to contact us to prompt us to redo that list, or we can tell them just to show up and buy a ticket there if we have the space.
We’re always reviewing event templates and processes, so we’ll review the contact we receive and comments made at events and make amendments as necessary.
Could earlier reminders be posted, especially for things like payment deadlines?
We kinda covered this in the general reminders question, but we have a new card reader, which will be better for connecting.
The Next Update:
Monday 22nd September
7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
MS teams
Sign up to attend below:
https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_NTcwZmEyNjctN2EwNS00YTg4LTllZjMtYzQyNjE2MjQ1OTBk%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%227791d3d4-f6f7-44e4-bd57-e6c1dea91b73%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%224d4619ac-0aba-4e29-809b-4321fcfee63a%22%7d
Autistic Nottingham 