[TheForge] ABANA Poll

[Bruce Freeman]

Phlip,

Do what you like, but if you run a poll you'll be wasting your time.  

Let me clarify:  In a VERY active organization, 10% of the membership will show up for a meeting.  That's a GOOD turnout!  In my experience, only a fraction of that number will return questionaires.  Overall, you'd be lucky to get a 2% response.  Without statistical analysis, you'll never convert those results into a meaningful representation of what people thinkk.  

Yet the polling will keep you busy - unproductively - for a long time to come.  First you have to design the questionaire.  Then you have to have it vetted.  Then you need somehow to send it out.  Since not everybody has email, someone is going to have to pay postage.  And even if ABANA lets you have their membership list for this, how are you going to get it to non-members?  Okay, so you decide to work through the affiliates - good idea.  Now you have to get all the editors on board to print your questionaire - so it had better be short!  Oh, and by the way, at least one chapter I know of prints only two newsletters a year - and you'll probably miss the upcoming one, so it's gonna be more than six months before those folks hear of this poll, if ever.  Then you wait for responses.  They trickle in.  (Kinda like Reagan's trickle-down.)  Eventually, you give up in disgust waiting for more.  Those who did respond wonder why they bothered since nothing ever came of it.  Most of us have been through this enough to know not to bother to return the questionairs in the first place.

IT'S A BLOODY WASTE OF TIME.  TOTALLY UNPRODUCTIVE EFFORT!

(Yes, I meant to shout.)

Do what you like...

Bruce
NJ

>>> phlip at 99main.com 3/2/2007 9:39 AM >>>
Steve- are you guys willing to donate something as an incentive to
fill out the ABANA Poll I just got suckered into setting up? Good
advertising, yadda yadda.

Would really like your help, but can understand if you can't.

Thanks,

-- 
Saint Phlip

Heat it up
Hit it hard
Repent as necessary.

Priorities:

It's the smith who makes the tools, not the tools which make the smith.
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