Hello Members!

We wanted to announce that the NCRA/ANREC is improving how we communicate with our members to make sure that our communication is precise, relevant and limited. In addition, the NCRA/ANREC board has approved our new Communications Plan and Strategy. This is done to help facilitate better communications among our members, the public and our lobbying/advocacy efforts.

We are releasing our Communications Plan publically to our members for two reasons:

1. It gives you insight into the goals that are developed from your input (membership priority survey, answering emails, communicating with staff/board, the in-person “open-space”).
2. It allows you a template to develop your own policy or processes, which we encourage stations to do so. NCRA/ANREC staff will always review any policy or process and encourage you to share it with us so we can help with any ideas or comments.

Practically, this means there will be a few changes for members that you will notice.

The NCRA/ANREC has approved Membee as our membership software (Notice was sent in November). We will be moving ALL CRITICAL EMAILS to that system, where the “heads of station/NCRA Contact” will receive these notifications. This will decrease the general traffic and will mean that important information gets directly to station leadership.

Why:  We have found that too many stations are missing the critical emails. We will only be sending critical emails to this e-mail now.  We ask that you look for e-mails that say [NCRA-IMPORTANT] for those emails.

New contact plans.  We find that stations are much more successful when they communicate with us on a regular basis. It helps staff keep a pulse on the sector and support stations locally.  

With that in mind, we are launching a new 6/20 program.  Every 6 Months, we plan to talk with each station (a Board, staff, volunteer, it does not need to be the same person) about the station issues, and challenges. For the NCRA/ANREC this is to build the relationship between the staff and your station for more effective support.  This is not a system where we will be calling you about dues, other important information. By speaking directly, we hope to eliminate some of the emails that go through our main email list by providing resources and support directly.

What about ALL THE EMAILS?

The staff at the NCRA/ANREC have heard you clearly. We will convey incredibly important information directly through Membee. We will also look to aggregate less important information into weekly, or bi-weekly digest emails. We will also work to ensure that emails offering guidance from us don’t balloon into long email threads. 

Finally, we ask that if you have a question to ask the office, and then we can point you towards some best practices, or possible answers in the Wiki. We don’t want to discourage debate on our email threads, but we are hoping to minimize the amount of traffic. We are exploring a forum, or a chat feature, for example, to redirect some of those questions from the emails into other avenues. 

1. My Community, My Voice – We are launching a new branded model for listener-focused interest called My Community, My Voice.  This will be a website that will be focused on sharing content for the public. Our goal is to have this up in the spring.  
   1. NCRA.ca has been re-branded for a recruitment tool (currently sitting at new.ncra.ca) for new members only and will not be used for anything but basic information. 
   2. Members.ncra.ca is our members-only site and that is where members can get all of their information from via login (using membee) If you have not logged in already, you can do so by resetting your password here

That is all for now. Any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out.

Barry Rooke
Luke Smith
NCRA/ANREC Staff