Open personal letter to the trustees of the UK ME Association, December 2024

Trish said:
Having failed to reach a couple of the trustees directly, I sent my letter to the admin email and asked for it to be sent on. I have received this acknowledgement:

Dear Trish

Thank you for your email.

I have passed this on to our Trustees.

In the last few weeks, we have experienced a large increase in enquiries to the charity, many of which concerned the recent AGM and the topics discussed there.

This has resulted in our staff spending much of their time on dealing with many different enquirers but who are raising similar questions. Naturally, this means a duplication of effort and time for our staff and means that our response cannot be as prompt as we would wish.

We have prepared a Q and A section on our website which we hope will answer your questions. https://meassociation.org.uk/about-the-mea/policies-and-documents/ If any new questions are raised then we will add answers to them through that section.

This has three great advantages:-
  1. Your questions will be dealt with promptly
  2. Our staff will be able to concentrate on the primary purpose of the charity in helping people with ME/CFS through information, support, education and research
  3. Updating you on answers to new questions will be faster and enable you to be better informed
Kind regards

Helen
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That sounds lovely.
So you just keep logging on every day in the hope that your question is added and some sub-par whitewash answer accompanies it.
 
Trish said:
Having failed to reach a couple of the trustees directly, I sent my letter to the admin email and asked for it to be sent on. I have received this acknowledgement:

Dear Trish

Thank you for your email.

I have passed this on to our Trustees.

In the last few weeks, we have experienced a large increase in enquiries to the charity, many of which concerned the recent AGM and the topics discussed there.

This has resulted in our staff spending much of their time on dealing with many different enquirers but who are raising similar questions. Naturally, this means a duplication of effort and time for our staff and means that our response cannot be as prompt as we would wish.

We have prepared a Q and A section on our website which we hope will answer your questions. https://meassociation.org.uk/about-the-mea/policies-and-documents/ If any new questions are raised then we will add answers to them through that section.

This has three great advantages:-
  1. Your questions will be dealt with promptly
  2. Our staff will be able to concentrate on the primary purpose of the charity in helping people with ME/CFS through information, support, education and research
  3. Updating you on answers to new questions will be faster and enable you to be better informed
Kind regards

Helen
Click to expand...

Using the Q&A section on their website may be helpful to communicate a more substantial amount of information at one go, but as it stands I doubt it would help with ongoing communication issues. Firstly it would not be obvious to a casual reader when more information was added or what is new; secondly it offers no channel for ongoing discussion of these issues and thirdly it’s relatively obscure location and the associated/intervening page titles mean even if you know it exists this section is not straight forward to find.

It would make more sense for it to be directly linked to as a news item with new news notices on the front page of the site whenever it was updated.
 
Peter Trewhitt said:
Using the Q&A section on their website may be helpful to communicate a more substantial amount of information at one go, but as it stands I doubt it would help with ongoing communication issues. Firstly it would not be obvious to a casual reader when more information was added or what is new; secondly it offers no channel for ongoing discussion of these issues and thirdly it’s relatively obscure location and the associated/intervening page titles mean even if you know it exists this section is not straight forward to find.

It would make more sense for it to be directly linked to as a news item with new news notices on the front page of the site whenever it was updated.
Click to expand...
Let’s face it, they don’t think they should have to engage with the membership. And they don’t want to.
 

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