Health facts
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Last summer, I tried to review some facts that could be more meaningful than pure “numbers” about french Rotaract health. It leads me to the conclusion that… well, wait, I let you do the process by yourself.
Imagine you are Dr House, looking at the patient called “French Rotaract”. Here’s the data that you have : |
Some facts from patient’s file :
- No volunteer for national coordination presidency in 2007-2008
- Year 2008-2009, a candidate did show up only at the last minute. It seemed he had to be pushed really hard, too hard because he finally resigned in the middle of the year (*)
- 2007 national convention was cancelled ; records says the organizing club has been chosen only 12 month before the date, which is way too short compared to previous editions (it is usually planned 2 years ahead)
- at national coordination, there is a list of closing clubs that is incremented almost every 2 month
(*) Disclaimer : only my humble interpretation, as i’ve been involved in that story
Recuring impressions gathered from interviews with “the patient” (= the rotaractors) :
- “each project is hardly completed. Every year it seems some easy things are no more easy »
(national convention, national social projects, newsletter, collecting fees, etc.) - “we hardly find people to serve on Rotaract management. Apart from leading, things like making a regular newsletter became hard. We hardly find one guy, bearing everything on his shoulder, or working hard to have some other rotaractors committing”
(to compare, in some countries, for writing one article you get three volunteers in a snap) - “we have no clear statement wether we are ok or not… how can we know it ?”
(interpretation by contraposition : if we were ok… we would know it, wouldn’t we ?) - “most of the time we do things because “we used to do that way”. When asked if these are traditions, or if it has a real meaning, “We always did that way” seems a recurring answer
(interpretation : I think it is a collective behaviour that organisations tend to adopt when they don’t feel safe about their integrity ; it is a collective response to a feeling of weakness, you prefer to not risk to loose something when you think you won’t gain anything)
Some non factual comments of your “assistants” after observing “the patient” :
- clubs do less common projects than they used to ; nation-wide processes gets erratic (see previous articles)
=> it seems that information do not flow very well along the “patient’s body” - clubs rarely call others for help now, which means to me they do not think about the other rotaractors as a source of help
=> it seems their overall unity gets weaker - because of the turn-over, patient barely knows how it was “before”, and the past is told more like urban legend than like facts
=> it seems patient has little memory
Now, Doctor, considering the symptoms, what would you say about the state of your patient ?
Dead lines = dead numbers
An interesting key of our processes is when we update the national member directoy. I think it has a great impact on the quality of our data.
We call for club member lists in summer, and do the big count in September. Because presidents are in charge since July, they have 2 month to send us an updated list. The summer period means low activity and students holidays : it’s hard to reach people, and hard to raise motivation. For starting presidents, just discovering their new charge, reporting to us -national board- is not their top priority.
At a glance, these lists are a boring job to do, in a lazy period of the year, when people are hard to reach, and you’ll do it in the last minute. Now, imagine how you would do the job in such situation ? Nice, clean, perfect ? Noooope. If you are a normal human being, you will do one of these options :
- send at the last minute what you have right under your hand, probably the last year’s dirty stuff, roughly updated.
- send your list after the deadline,
- try to negotiate the deadline.
… some club do never send their list at all… and I wonder if it really changed something for them.
So that’s my point : to get good data, we set up deadlines. Then who’s dead after all ? …our data.
A geophysist’s joke
I used to work in a geophysic prospection compagny (Compagnie Générale de Géophysique). Our clients were petroleum companies looking for oil, mostly. Our workers were geophysicists, they were interpreting massive scientific measures to produce a model of how the underground is made. How did they proceed ? It has to do with how we interpret our datas about membership in Rotaract. Let me tell a joke we had.
If you ask different workers “how much is Pi ?”
- mathematician says : “the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter”
- a physician says : “3,14159 plus or minus 10e5”
- an engineer says : “almost 3” [I’m engineer 🙂 ]
- a geophysicist asks : “how much you want it to be ?”
(If you’re a geophysist, please laugh)(I had to tell it, it deserve to be spread)
Usually the geophysist is missioned by a client, and the client has expectations. The geophysist anticipate clients expectations, so the results are partly oriented by them. About Rotaract, it is the same with clubs member directory. The presidents answers what the national boards are expecting.
Some national board had policies about member datas, so they influence the collect, unconsciously. Spreading the message “please clean the ghosts members from our database”, you launch a global ghostbuster effect the datas get shrinked quickly. On the other side, it can also happen that the national board call to raise the Rotaract manpower in France. Presidents want to be part of that success, they all want to bring hope. So you have a global ghost members effect : they keep as many members as they can in the directory.
Now imagine we want to analyze the tendency between two years : we have to consider the current board influence, the influence of the previous board, and compare them. Enjoy. It can’t be measured, it’s impossible. So, you get the point : to me, this national member count are not accurate, so we can’t analyze them : it is not a real evidence of an ongoing decline of Rotaract in France.
It is time to figure how healthy we are, apart from the number.
Ghost Members & Ghost Busters
Sometime, a member leaves Rotaract. That’s life. But the way it happens varies, and the way we record it is not absolutely fluent. That, also, has an impact on the national member count accuracy.
Sometime the membre leaves suddenly. Reached the age limit ; new job ; moved in another city or country ; or wanna move his life to something new. That’s life.
But at a regular rate either, some member leaves slowly, staying away from the club’s life too long. She (or he) wanna stay, but day to day life makes him less and less available. At first, she gives news, emails, or phone calls. Is she “in”, or “out” ?
The process is reversible : some people come back to action after being away a really long time. So it is fair to keep them in the list until they pay their contribution. When they doesn’t ? Well, it depends, but -my evaluation- if a guy send at least one email to say “Hello” to the club, she is still countered “in”. And it can lasts…
We have a name for that, we usually call them “ghost members”.
“Hey, I got news from Alexandra”, someone reports : Alexandra, you’re “in” one more year. You, ghost member.
Then once, there comes a new president (we change every year). That one wants a clear membership list, he faces reality, and slash decision : “she is out”. As he processes the whole list, he often cleans up all the ghosts at once. Let’s call him a Ghost Buster. (Bill Murray is my hero.)
When you just look at the member list of a healthy club, it appears like this : for a few years, the clubs seems to grow more and more ; then one year, it seems to fall abruptly. Fake hope, fake deception : the club workforce remained stable all along. It’s just a number artifact of ghosts members being piled up a few years and removed at once.
You got he point : you can’t tell one club manpower just by looking at his member list.
But how do you think the national manpower is calculated ? The national boards sum up all these clubs member lists and count.
On numbers
This summer, we had a national coordination week-end, a good time for updating our national member count. We discovered we are not 350 anymore (last
year’s estimations) but closer to 300, probably 305. That’s when this altitude question came back to my conscience.
But I must say I do not trust these numbers, I think these datas are highly unaccurate.
I’ll try to explain that in the coming articles.
(if you don’t like talking about numbers, skip these and wait for the article about the health facts of french Rotaract)
Who’s got an altimeter ?
I said already I felt a personal urgence to know what happened to us, like : I don’t want to stay with that mystery all my life. But another question came, more
profund, more hidden after all these years. The frightening one, you’ve heard it in every plane drama movie : the altitude question
“-Situation seems back under control, captain !
– OK, How high are we from the ground, now ?”
This question means : How risky is our present situation ?
For Rotaract either, if we talk about a past fall, we need now an “altimeter”. Here’s how we can get it : let’s review what numbers we have and what they tell us, and then review what other healthindicators we could use.