The postal process may have been the right decision, David. My negative experiences were centered around the apathetic attitude of CIRA customer service and the lack of a resolution process.

No process is flawless… anybody with half a brain could say that a possibility exists whereby a member would not receive an email/phone call/postal mail and be correct.

But it was the organization’s responsibility to respond appropriately in the event of any procedural failure.

You already admitted that I fell under the minority. That’s great news! On the other hand, one has to wonder why I received such fowl support when I needed help with my token.

As the saying goes, ‘the proof is in the pudding.’

Ironically one of the reasons we opted for a letter mail delivery of voting tokens this election was due to complaints we’ve received in past elections that email was lost, deleted, or got caught in spam filters.

Your particular circumstances were not the norm – there was a keying error when we enetered your address which caused misdelivery of your voting token, and our processes didn’t handle your requests for another very well. I’m glad that you did bring the matter to my attention and that you were able to vote. I look forward to your continued participation as a CIRA Member.

David Hicks
Director of Marketing and Communications
CIRA

Dave: I appreciate your involvement and your comments. I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m going to wait to see what changes result and then I’ll pass judgment as to whether I believe people are really doing what they say they’re going to do.

Perhaps living up to your earlier re-branding suggestion, I will apologize again for the difficulty you experienced with this year’s election. I understand that you did receive a replacement token in the nick of time; while not perfect, you were able to cast your vote for the Directors of your choice and be counted in the election.

As I stated in your previous post we are looking into the customer service issues you reported and will take steps to improve processes to increase Member satisfaction.

With regards to the election itself, we conduct a thorough review of the elections both internally and externally (through our independent election Returning Officer.) These reports are presented to our Board of Directors and recommendations made within will form the basis for changes and improvements to future elections.

The participation levels this year were very good…but as the cliché goes, there is always room for improvement. We had excellent participation at all stages of the elections with more nominations and candidates than in previous years. Voter turnout was also strong considering changes to the Membership population. The question of what level of participation is sufficient is difficult to answer as every organization has different constituents, mandates, and impacts on stakeholders. Rest assured that increasing Member participation is a high priority item and we will be implementing additional programs to stimulate participation in CIRA Member activities in the future; it is my hope that these programs will result in even more Members participating in our next election.

David Hicks
Director of Marketing and Communications
CIRA