Guidelines re: tagging Society staff on the Community

Hi everyone,

Over the last few months, it’s been a pleasure to see so many of you interacting with Society staff here, including our buyers and Executive Team. :smiley:

This has increased a bit recently, and I’ve seen quite a few times where members have directly tagged buyers/other staff in discussions asking questions.

I don’t want to discourage this at all, but to make sure we can manage your expectations, I thought it would be useful to set out some guidelines about tagging Society staff in discussions:

  1. The first staff point of contact for a response here should be me or @kelly, as we’re the Community staff whose job is to monitor these pages and offer help! We can gladly field queries to relevant staff members and either ask them to respond or post a response on their behalf.
  2. While other Society staff do try to keep up to date with the Community as often as they can, they won’t catch every message here (especially if they’re out of office or fulfilling their other work commitments) so you’re free to tag them, but if you want a guaranteed response tag Kelly or me!

This is primarily a member-to-member discussion space - we will always do our best to respond as quickly as we can wherever we can help though! :+1:

And of course, there’s always our wonderful Member Services team for specific enquiries about your orders/share.

Hope this helps, everyone.

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Thanks for the clarification, makes sense. It’s been great having Steve and some of the buyers drop in but I can appreciate it’s more an exception. I’m sure they were plenty busy enough before we came along :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: and we can be such an enthusiastic bunch! :smiley: Nice to have this extra channel for them to reach out directly to part of the membership. :+1:

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@laura it would make sense for any WS staff/buyers etc to also use you as ‘their’ interface with Community members. There are definitely a couple of cliques forming on here who appear to think they share privileges that others do not. Using yourself would be more egalitarian.

Absolutely - as I mention above, if any other staff members aren’t around to respond on any occasion, Kelly and I can post a response on their behalf, as we have in the past. :slight_smile: That’s why I advise tagging us in the first instance - we don’t necessarily read every single post here so a quick tag will alert us to the fact we can be of assistance!

Every forum has its rules so can I ask as neutrally as possible if you can clarify whether or not staff may be tagged?

It’s not a rule, it’s more about managing expectations. :slight_smile:

You’re welcome to tag staff (as I mention in the original post, above) but you shouldn’t expect a guaranteed reply from them - they’ll inevitably miss some tags or not be around to provide you with a response, and this forum isn’t a direct line to them.

If you expect a definite response you should tag Kelly or me so we can help.

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Think that’s very clear and absolutely sensible.

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