President's Corner
What Happened At The Last Meeting
by John Shenot
I want to use this month’s column to explain what went wrong at our January program and apologize to any members who tried to attend via Zoom and were unable to join us.
As I was setting up all the gear for our usual combined in-person and Zoom meeting, and just about when I was thinking to myself that things were going unusually smoothly, I discovered a few minutes before start time that the Zoom link we published in our newsletter, on our website, and on our social media channels was wrong. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out that the last number in the link got cut off. It took a couple more minutes for me to find a file on my laptop that had the email addresses of many of our members. I sent a quick message to those people with the correct Zoom link and hoped for the best.
Some folks clearly got the message, as more than 30 people ended up attending the program via Zoom. But I have no doubt some people who were excited to hear Ted Floyd's excellent presentation on Cooper's Hawks didn't see my emergency email, couldn't get into the meeting, and were disappointed. I'm sorry about that.
For future programs, we are initiating additional quality control measures to make sure nothing like this happens again. We also would welcome assistance from any volunteers who have professional IT, audio/visual, or meeting planning expertise. And this is a good time to remind
members that we record our guest presentations, provided we have
permission from the guest speaker, and post the recordings on our YouTube channel. If you missed Ted Floyd or any of our other recent guest speakers, that's the place to go!