Sarah sent out a message to all MLs on February 9th asking folks' intention to continue. We recognized that this may be a year in which there are a lot of shifts, and the link Sarah sent out asked a number of things we needed to know in order to proceed. It asked folks for their forum usernames. It asked folks what region they volunteered for. All of those are needed for us to effectively plan and manage the program.
The information we received from that survey is our new source of truth about program participation and it is our new primary document for managing participants. For example, where MLs answered with a plan not to continue, we needed to know there may be a gap in that region. We needed to begin the (unfortunately) manual process of changing their status on the forums and within their regions. We need to remove them from our communication lists so we're not sending them unwanted messages.
We also wanted to know how many folks definitively planned to continue so we could do short-term cash flow planning for the new onboarding process. We wanted a ballpark understanding of how many folks were on the fence so we could understand the need for floating moderators and staff moderation. Though some saw this as a failure in organization and planning, it was us being more intentional about planning. The alternative would have been to continue to blast communications into the same list of MLs with no visibility into actual engagement. Our decision was to continue engaging with folks who were still engaged.
The answer to receiving the communication, for anyone who hasn't received it is to fill out the form from the January 9th communication so we can continue to manage the program from our new baseline. Because it is a manual process to send out the communication based on new form entries, we will send these out in waves.