= Proposal: Outreach and Inreach =

[wiki:projects/leadership-committee/dec-2008/agenda Return to agenda]

== Outreach ==

Currently, Alfredo and Jamie make a lot of decisions around what meetings, conferences and campaigns to attend and put our resources behind. 

Although the leadership committee does not need to be involved in every decision, we should provide a broad framework of the political movements, tendencies, and types of organizations that we should be supporting. This framework should be informed by the direction the left is moving and how we want to influence it?

=== Membership ===

We think people join May First/People Link for several reasons (and usually several if these are present in a new member):

 * Good features at a reasonable price
 * Really good service (especially tech support)
 * Politically solid people to work with -- and this is more present now than ever before in our new members.
 * Referred by another member or by a techie (member or not member)

But MF/PL has no outreach strategy and has never done any real "become a member" outreach. With membership growth stagnating, it may be time to change that.

=== Why Should People Join Us? ===

One of our pieces of literature -- our palm card -- explains this well, we think.

https://support.mayfirst.org/wiki/mfpl/2008_palm_card_text

=== Ground work ===

We are proposing a massive email campaign, comprised of relatively short "argument-based" emails to every progressive organization and individual that we can identify and that we know has a website.

== Inreach ==

=== Project: Membership constituency workshops ===

Goals: 

 * Make membership more conscious of technology capabilities in their work; 
 * Make members more conscious of what membership actually means and what this organization is doing and capable of doing; 
 * Develop a new and more "democratic" approach to technology development.

Proposal: Dividing our membership into "constituencies" (labor, community-based, arts, etc.), we would bring together these members into workshops during which we would discuss how the current capabilities we have can be better used by them in their "area-specific" work and what other capabilities they feel they need from MF/PL. Flowing from this discussion, we would then work to develop these capabilities.

This would be the first time that MF/PL has actually sought to involve all its members in a unified activity, something which can become very significant in the coming period.