August 2012
Back to School Edition… clear those bedrooms! Our latest Scholarly Edition is from the independent FreeSpOut team; sending news from the world of Freegle to Group Owners, moderators and friends of Freegle.
The place to go for a chat and a laugh is the...
Freegle Cafe
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CONTENTS: Group members’ responses More on Fb and FD Freegle Volunteers Freegle Chat
Good News: Russ (Bracknell) recently received a call from his local newspaper telling him that he had been nominated for a Pride of Bracknell award (Environment section) for the Freegle Group.
The nomination came from one of the members , Russ said, and the call was totally out of the blue. (How cool is that) Well done and good luck, Russ
Good for Buxton! Suzanne was interviewed on High Peak Radio on Monday 12th August.
Please feel free to pass this on to anyone who may be interested. Keep on Freeglin’!
Freegle Stats 185 use Twitter, 195 Facebook and173 Freegle Direct.
Is your group using all these to make sure you get lots of members and messages? (See p 4)
We have 1,390,021 members in 356 groups across the UK.
Welcome to the groups who have joined since our last issue: Aberdeen Freegle and Falkirk Free2Go
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Freestock Special Edition: We held our annual “Get-together” this month, with some members visiting for just one or two nights and others staying for the whole ten days. Carole “Sixmum” took two of her brood with her, and is now compiling a free and frank account of their time there. If you don’t want a photograph of yourself to be included, please let her know via the FreeSpOut address. A nice tale A Stafford member offered some Single Malt whisky which was not to their taste: The first “taker” was (amazingly!) a no show, so she offered it to a second person and wrote in her “Taken” post “... What a very lovely man Bernard!! Hope you totally enjoy.” I had an idea about this, so I contacted the member Me: Oh, I do hope that was my old boss, BB, who is now about 80? He was traditionally given a bottle from the staff at school and I used to collect the cash for it. One year I dropped the bottle (after school!) and he came into my classroom to find me cleaning up the mess. A lovely man indeed, he told me not to buy another but to give him a dummy bottle which he wouldn't open in front of the staff. Of course, I did buy him another, then had to make him open it on the last day of term, in case he got rid of it without checking! Please let me know if it was him. Member: I am quite sure he is the same sweet man. How lovely too, it reallllly did go to the best home xx Liz, Stone and Stafford © FreeSpOut 2012
From the groups
Help for Groups both Old and New Admin sent out to some groups
A recent post on Central suggested sending a Special Notice out to group members, telling them how much it actually costs to maintain Freegle, both financially and in “person-hours”, then inviting donations of time or practical help. This can be read in full on the site. (#31100) Has your group done this?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ … and some responses 1 Edward (Edinburgh) had a discussion with a member, who has with remarkable generosity made a gift-aided donation of £1200 to support our media work. The Reps will discuss how to handle this donation, a good problem to have. He has said he would appreciate (but not require) an acknowledgment on the website, and it might be nice to have a page where we list people who support us (financially, and perhaps also with time), assuming people want to be listed in this way. 2 Jo (Fife) reports that a member is .”.. willing to advertise the service on one of my cars that I take to Knockhill for track days. I already advertise my own business and a couple of others, it's not major marketing but every bit of advertising helps achieve the 'big picture'. … I'll cover the cost of the decals & I put them on myself so there's no cost to Freegle. You'd have to give me written permission to use the logo if you wanted to go ahead. 3 David (Reading) passed on another letter from :”… a useless 76 year old Has Been” who comments that we “...are doing a great job for the environment and it is a shame that you are out of pocket..” He says that the local Parish Mag “...gets good revenue from local ads and nobody objects to it. There must be many local trades people who can’t afford to advertise on a large scale that could benefit from such coverage. You could put an ad under each entry such as: Offered Bird Cage. Lower Shiplake. .Dunnarunner@... "All your pets needs at Pets Heaven . Open 7 days a week 9am to 6pm." David asks us for any thoughts on this idea, “as I have often thought of local sponsorship (where we would maybe change our footer for a month for say LOCAL enterprises.”
August 2012
We're looking at recruiting volunteers via local memberships, which is great and even though it may lead to a lot of dead ends, we could pick up some real gems! Here's some thoughts for consideration: 1. Should we ask potential group member volunteers which group they belong to, and then possibly approach mods for 'references'. Would your group be happy with that? 2. We might get an offer from someone who doesn't 'appear' to be a member of any group - ie they are using a different email address, or aren't actually a Freegle group member. Would that be a problem with you and your group? 3. It might be easier if we devise some sort of simple standard 'role description' so everyone can see what is needed and put themselves forward if they feel they would be suited/have the necessary skills. 4. Our top priority of skills needed are IT capability, but we are also in need of national publicity, fundraising and graphics. If you have any of these talents to offer or you know someone who has, please don't hesitate to email volunteers@ilovefreegle.org. Julie will be very pleased to hear from you! " You will see more thoughts on this subject on page 4 of this issue. Freeview problems? If members offer a freeview TV, it might be worth pointing out the problem encountered by David.
Freegle Chat
On quite a few old CRT TVs (ie Old Sonys or Bush TVs) the Freeview does not work at all and several TVs that say To subscribe: “Freeview” are not any-more so FreegleRockCafeworth doing a Google search subscribe@yahoogroups.com for specific models.#31095
Have you looked at our Working Groups? They are always keen to recruit new © FreeSpOut 2012 members.
Catch up!
Freegle Direct - preview photos: Please will you remind members that they can post photographs? People react much better to photos than they do to text, and this is all part of trying to help prospective members see why it's worth bothering to join. (as mentioned in last issue.) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Facebook and Freegle Direct members: Freegle Tech was home to a discussion about how to identify or remove them etc. (starting #9469) Q: There has been some confusion about members with addresses like FBUser.1336412454.702369@.. Are they Fb or FD members, and if there is a difference how can we tell? A: It applies to either; do you need to be able to distinguish between them? I think so because I had a member email me as they had a Yahoo Membership AND a FBuser one and could not stop emails. (It would also be great to have an option to see how many FD and or FB members we have in the message posts bit of plugin) Edward added this to the modplugin within a fortnight, so we can all now check.
Wall of Fame
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August 2012
The Reps have suggested ways of rewarding members to make them more active, one of which is to have a "wall of fame" on our website for members who recruit other members to join. The hope is that this kind of reward would get more word of mouth going. To implement this, we need something that will: Take a list of names from a table in MySQL. Gradually construct a Freegle Heart logo using bricks with the names on them. Ideally adapt to the number of names that we have. So, if we only have 10 names, then we would want big bricks, but as (hopefully) the number of people increases we would want to reduce the size of the bricks. Some thought is needed as to how best to do this. One way would be to wait until the heart becomes complete, then shrink the brick size and start again. The basic script would need to be in PHP, but the fancy aspects of the construction could be done either in PHP (preferable) or in Javascript (acceptable). Is there anyone who would like to have a go at this? If so, please contact the Tech group.
Local meet-up suggestions One of the things we discussed a bit at FreeStock was that it would be nice if we did more regional meetups. Not so much camping in a field, but meeting up for Sunday lunch, either in a pub, or someone's place for a bring and share. A few of these have been done in Scotland, and we feel we should do more. Although it's a bit weird meeting random people from t'internet, everyone turns out to be very nice and very few of them have knives. It was particularly nice to meet a couple of other people from Norfolk this year, and one of the things which helps them be so active in their area is because they meet up regularly, drawn by the inexorable lure of Fiona's brownies. We've talked about this before, but we're not great at making it happen. I wonder whether anyone would like to do a bit of coordination on this: Ask for volunteers to organise them. Put them on a google map to see where we have someone and therefore how wide an area they should cover. Help coordinate date arrangements if need be (e.g. organise doodle polls). Help for Keep track of when they're happening. Publicise them on Central and regional groups. Mods Remind people to have more. Anyone fancy that? If we ask nicely, perhaps Fiona will share the recipe. The Norfolk groups use http://doodle.com/ to come up with a date. One person slots in dates that would suit them and a location, then posts the link to everyone else and the day that suits the most people is the one chosen. (They are having one in Norfolk on 22nd at John's house - I am sure he won't mind me inviting you all along too:-) Saira and Liz have also discussed a meet-up. Anyone in the environs of Oswestry /Stafford interested? © FreeSpOut 2012 Liz has offered to host, but we could meet half way, or elsewhere in the Midlands.
Volunteer Catch up!
The Norfolk System
August 2012
The seven Norfolk groups and Waveney (Suffolk) have moved over to their own bespoke website - http://norfolkfreegle.org .- which is completely separate from Yahoo. The Norfolk mods have been talking about this for 6 years but couldn’t really do anything about it until the move to Freegle inspired and allowed it. A committee was formed, bank account opened and business plan put together in 2010. We then embarked on looking for funding based on the best of three quotes we had for developing and providing a system. In January this year we secured the last of the funding for the project (although we had already commissioned the work to start!). We have registered as a charity for tax purposes and are also VAT registered. We intend to fund the system from now on via discrete local advertising. So it is brand new and up and running. The eight groups are being closed down on timetable, the last ones closing as this Freespout publication is being sent out. The things, but the main idea is to make it easy to join and use for freeglers and moderation, which will free up the volunteers to do more local publicity
Yahoo on a planned system offers lots of to need much less and promotion.
It is a challenge, as we have ‘competition’ from Freecycle, Facebook and Gumtree in our area, all offering online reuse facilities, and we can’t transfer our members from Yahoo onto the new system. But we have persuaded over 2500 of them to transfer in this initial stage and will be working hard to get a lot more over the next year or so. It is a new step for Freegle and a bit frightening but really exciting for us over here in the East. Please do have a look and see what you think! Jacky, Great Yarmouth Community of Norfolk Freegle
Look to the Future… In post #30966 on Central, the Reps pointed out that Freegle is competing with organisations who have professional staff doing IT, media and organisation, often supported by professional fundraisers - and so we need to achieve certain standards in order to survive. We need a recognised national identity, a reputation at a local group level for integrity, caring, politeness and lack of obstacles, and because the bedrock of what we are is Internet-based, we need excellent IT capability. We do not need to offer something which is on a par with the competition in every respect, but we have to offer something which persuades people to use us rather than them in significant numbers.
So we still need yet more co-operation between local groups and Freegle nationally, and for us all to do whatever we can to help at a national as well as at a local level. *****If we have a website that is significantly more difficult to use, then people will use us less often. ***** *****If we have worse media coverage, then we lose out to one of the umpteen other startups. ***** *****If we have restrictive local groups, people may just take stuff to the dump instead.***** *****To be one of the mainstream options that people
have to dispose of unwanted items we need to form relationships with organisations who expect a professional way of operating. ***** Do read the full post; it offers much food for thought .
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Volunteers Still needed
Volunteers / nominees were asked for these panels last month: http://wiki.ilovefreegle.org/Appeals_Panel_Procedure and http://wiki.ilovefreegle.org/Mediation_Service If you think that you have some/many/all of these qualities then please nominate yourself to be in one or both of the pools of panellists. If you know someone who would fit this role well then please nominate them by emailing Kathy at ombudsman@ilovefreegle.org
FreeSpOut is produced by the independent FreeSpOut team; these are our words. GET IN TOUCH! The team presently consists of Jacky (Great Yarmouth), Carole (Hayle & St. Ives), Liz (Stafford,) Hazel (Stevenage) & Ray (Thanet). If you have any suggestions, contributions or want to be involved in producing this newsletter, contact us: Team@freespout.org.uk © FreeSpOut 2012 We would like to thank the Reps for their support. (Alison, Cat, Edward, Jacky, Jane, Ollie, Richard, Saira and Sian. reps@ilovefreegle.org