SUCCEEDGROUP AND KOGELBERG BRANCH

Merrilee Berrisford

SucceedGroup senior consultant, Emmerentia Fick, held a meeting with three branch committee members at the new offices in Somerset West at the end of March.

Emmerentia had sent us a comprehensive Action Plan detailing what SG would like to do for us (in addition to designing and sending out the newsletter and designing publicity material). The meeting was to take us through the plans showing how the branch can be brought into the digital age to more effectively promote our message: “Committed to the Conservation of a Unique Wildflower Heritage”.

Barbara Attwell, newsletter editor, Jan Joubert and I were so impressed by the scope of what we’ll have and by the generosity of SucceedGroup. There will be a Kogelberg website, not too complicated but effectively showcasing our activities. Committee members will have special stationery for emails using Intelligent Business Emails which means having a number of interactive banners at the top with pictures of local scenes, flowers, animals and Learn More statements at the click of a mouse – informative, selling, or just bragging: “The Betty’s Bay Hack is 53 years old”.  The Hack will have its own banners with appropriate pictures.

Which brings me to an important request. If you have pictures we could use, please send to mberrisford@xsinet.co.za. We are going to need many for variety.

Emmerentia went through detailed statistics for our electronic newsletters:

For the 6 months SG has sent them out, the average percentage of newsletters opened each month is 47%. She was absolutely thrilled by that figure; the average for the hundreds of newsletters SG sends is around 16%, once they had 25%!

We know that in the January issue the article most read was, not surprisingly, about Edward Silberbauer’s retirement as Hack Convenor; we actually have figures for every single article.

All three of us left SucceedGroup House feeling excited by what we’d heard. We were proud to see the BotSoc logo among hundreds of others (mainly law firms) on glass lining the main passage in the building, “Our important clients,” said Emmerentia.

There is much work to be done but the branch will be better equipped to carry out our aims.

Back in Betty’s Bay, when Jan was asked how the meeting had been, his reply was a firm, “Excellent”. That says it all.