Hey everyone! Its already halfway though November, where has the time gone? Yeeesh! We wanted to give a organization heartbeat to just summarize whats going on, what we’re planning and whats coming up! Wild! In this heartbeat we’re going to talk about some feedback action items, CoC changes, and some new Social Media initiatives.
Posting Heartbeats!
We’re going to work on making this a quarterly habit! Stay tuned for more of these, we hope they help give insight into what we’re doing as an org.
Elections!
Its that time of year again, As a 501c3 nonprofit, we require a board of directors to be operational. Want to level up your leadership game? Consider nominating yourself, or someone else, as a candidate for the board! 2024 Board Nominations are OPEN (Closing Nov 25, 2023)
Your Feedback: Staff Identification
We’ve been reading and listening to your feedback in our surveys. You’ve expressed that its sometimes hard to identify staff at our flagship events, and we agree. In the past we’ve done badges, lanyards, etc, but these tend to blend too easily with other attendees with badges. We’ve also have had staff sitting at a “staff table” but this wasn’t super clearly marked. So we’re working on two initiatives to improve this.
First the easiest one is better communicating during our plugs where staff are. Typically at some of our bigger events we’ll thank people for coming, mention milestone dates, how to donate and upcoming events. During these plugs, we’ll make an effort to also identify where staff can be found at the event.
Second, we’re investing some of our funding (Thanks to donations like yours!) to purchase some vests that will clearly mark our staff. Vests should be easier to spot from a distance than a lanyard would be, so we’re hopeful this will help. The purchase has been made and we’re hopeful to have those soon at our next Oval meet, Picnic, etc.
Your Feedback: Finding the group
I would have cracked a LFG joke here, but not sure how “Mainstream” that reference is for people to get. If you got the reference, awesome. In the Event Surveys people have mentioned that its sometimes difficult to “Find the group” for the events that involve a lot of moving as a group around a venue or park. So we are exploring a large outdoor flag/banner that the group can travel with, like at our Fursuit Romps. We hope that the inclusion of a flag will help identifying where the group is from a distance, a little easier. In addition to that, when staffing/volunteers warrant, someone will hangout near the originating spot of the group to help point people in the right direction. This depends on volunteer coverage, so we’ll do our best!
The purchase of said flag has been pitched and is being explored.
Code Of Conduct Changes
This one is a bit of a surprise that it isn’t in our current Code of Conduct, but we’ve added the following verbiage to the CoC “Inappropriate behavior includes, but is not limited to:” section:
- Negligent Disregard of Posted Venue Rules & Policies
In summary, Please respect the rules of the venue. This means if you are attending an event at a Park, Hotel, Bar, Coffee Shop, etc, please familiarize yourself with the venue rules and follow them. You can review the latest Code of Conduct at https://coc.mnfurs.org.
Social Changes: Bluesky
Our communications team is exploring social media platforms! We currently prioritize being on Twitter X, and Facebook, but haven’t explored too many other platforms recently. We recently got some invite codes to Bluesky, and are looking into potentially leveraging the platform for MNFurs and Furry Migration. Keep an eye out, maybe we’ll start using it. But at the sametime we don’t want to over-extend our social media platform efforts, so time will tell.
