FAO "Keep Town in Swindon" people

[BrightonRed]

Just having a little think about the postcards / Letters method for gauging / proving opinion regarding the redevelopment of the County Ground.

Like a lot of people I know, I printed off a number of letters at work, got them filled in and sent them off.. but I'd imagine to a lot of people it would seem like a lot of effort for little expected reward.

Has anyone considered premium text messages as a method of registering support?
They seem relatively easy and cheap to set up and would give people the opportunity to register their support in their own time in the space of 20 seconds whilst also donating a percentage of money to the club.

I would be more than happy to send a text message that I knew would only cost £1, especially if I knew that 65p would be going to the club and that my support for the redevelopment of the county ground would be registered.

A five digit number and a 'keyword' would be easy to advertise around the town and wouldn't require volunteers armed with clipboards.

Support would be registered on a computer and could be forwarded to the relevant council members etc.

Get people doing it on a weekly basis and you've got a nice small source of additional income.

Anyway, just an idea. Keep up the good work.

[yeo]

I suggested something simular in the Trust site for the RAF but couldnt find out how you did it and costs and stuff.I think Triseretops said it costs loads to set up.

[pauld]

Not a bad idea in itself BR but very different to what we're trying to do with the postcards - the point of the postcards is not as a general message of support for the scheme, but a specific targeted message to your local councillor. The point being that while councillors will take some notice of a broad spread of people being kind of in favour of something, they really start to sit up when their voters contact them directly on an issue, because that directly affects their vote. We've tried to make it as easy as possible by having pens, postcards, lists of councillors etc available for people on matchdays and those we collect there we even deliver for you! It doesn't get a lot easier, to be fair.

Erm, does that make sense? In terms of why we're targetting councillors specifically rather than a general petition or whatever?

Incidentally, if people do find the effort of writing their own letter too much, we've got a sample one you can cut and paste on the Keep Town in Swindon website. It's a bit long as it stands, as it's kind of a letter containing all the arguments, so you may want to cut it down to just the points important to you. And there's lists of councillors email addresses as well, so it should be just a few clicks, quick edit and you're done.

But I do see the general point about writing letters being a hassle - I've got three I'm supposed to be doing at the moment (none STFC-related, FWIW) and keep putting them off as a chore.

The text thing is a good idea of itself, maybe its something we could pass onto the club to look at as they're doing the more generalised petition-based stuff?