After a gap of twenty years or so since I was last on a committee, I have now found myself on two. The last time I was on a committee it was that of a sailing association. We were members, and I'd sent them some suggestions about their events and how they were run, which provoked the response 'With ideas like that you ought to be on the committee'. I joined it, and discovered that there was nothing tangible for me or any other new member of the committee to do. The officer's posts were all filled by people who, while they grumbled about how over-worked they were, had no intention of delegating anything, and the events were run on the basis of doing again what we did last year. After a year or two the Systems Administrator and I switched from that kind of sailing to a different boat, and drifted away from the association, and I gave up the committee, making a mental note to avoid them in future.
Roll the clock forward twenty years, and I am finding committee life fascinating as a study in human nature, and an object lesson in how not to get things done. The individual members, who have bothered to give up their evening to sit in a church hall or somebody's dining room when they could be at home watching Masterchef, have presumably gone there with good intentions, wishing to further the activities of the club or society. There is the odd E.F. Benson, Mapp and Lucia moment, when you can see people manoeuvre to foil someone else's pet project to which they object, but generally everyone has not gone there with the explicit aim of not getting things done. And yet the committee has to be one of the most effective mechanisms invented for converting human energy and ideas into noise, culminating in no action.
It is said that people don't value what they don't pay for. I'm sure that's true. One of my fellow beekeeping committee members would like to see us charge our beginners for their first swarm of bees, which we now give them for free, and charge more for lessons than we do. As she says, beekeeping is not a cost-free hobby, and if they can't or won't pay anything for their first bees they can't afford to keep them, and don't want them enough. To the chairman and officers of a committee, there is no cost to signing up a few extra committee members, or letting the old ones stay on indefinitely. At the beekeepers committee meetings we don't even get refreshments. The music society lives more graciously, with tea and cake, and an annual supper thrown in. But commercial organisations don't run themselves on the basis of assembling random groups of managers, half of whom have no specific duties or responsibilities, who then all discuss everything.
It is another characteristic of committees that the agenda tends to be the same at each meeting. Minutes of the last meeting, Chairman's report, Secretary's report, Treasurer's report. Anything that any of the supernumerary committee members might have been delegated to do will be covered under AOB, which always falls at the end of the meeting, when people are tired, concentration slipping and tempers shortening. But if the ad hoc project that the committee agreed at the previous meeting doesn't appear on the agenda for the next one, that reduces the incentive to get on with it. Perhaps everyone else will have forgotten, or nobody will want to talk about it. It was agreed at one beekeepers committee meeting that someone should prepare a welcome pack for new members, telling them what happened at our apiary meetings and so on, to encourage them to take part. The person who agreed to take on the job had in the past said we ought to have such a thing, which is why I volunteered him. Come the next meeting it wasn't on the agenda, the Chairman didn't mention it, nor the person who'd agreed to prepare the welcome pack, and I didn't have the heart. Like I said, I'm only the Treasurer. Two more meetings further on we are no closer to having a welcome pack.
Last night it was the turn of the ad hoc working group on publicity. We'd done exactly what the Chairman had asked us to do in her e-mail, got together and brainstormed, and someone had written up our ideas ready to present to the meeting. Publicity wasn't on the agenda. I e-mailed the Chairman and Secretary, cc my fellow brainstormers, to remind them that we were ready to talk about it, and publicity was scheduled for AOB.
A music society like ours books acts one to two seasons ahead, so at this time of the year we are in the later stages of finalising 2013-14, and starting to work on 2014-15. Booking a programme of just five concerts plunges you into a bewildering maze of contingent decisions. You don't want too many string quartets in the same season. One act you would like is very restricted as to dates. You want to schedule your most expensive and prestigious artists for the beginning and end of the season, to start and end with a flourish and so that the cheapest ones are booked for the depths of winter, when ticket sales are most likely to be hit by bad weather. You have to worry about the date of Easter, because people will be doing other things and you can't book the church then for a concert. Should you even attempt an oboe concert with continuo, which means borrowing a harpsichord from somewhere and paying for an extra musician in the form of a cellist, or should you just take the simple option and go for a piano? Do you like a particular quartet more than another enough to pay an extra five hundred pounds for them? Will a group based in Germany drop their charge to us if they have other concerts in the region so that their travel costs are amortised over several music societies? Should we drop the December concert date, because people have so many other things to go to in December, and move the fifth concert to spring when the weather might be nicer? The Bookings Secretary began to look more and more exhausted, and the Chairman became fractious. The Treasurer had to leave for another engagement.
Eventually we got on to the subject of publicity. Audience numbers for the young soprano were deemed disappointing, by the way, so the question of how to attract more people is getting more urgent. Our suggestions on what we might try doing uncovered a deep strand of pessimism in the rest of the committee. There was no point in trying to attract a younger audience, because they weren't interested and didn't have time and couldn't afford it. There was no point in trying to attract more older people because they didn't like driving at night and couldn't afford it. Everybody had too many other things to do. Our posters were not eye-catching enough but more attractive, eye-catching posters would be too expensive to print. People didn't take any notice of posters. Our kind of audience wouldn't use Facebook or Twitter so there was no point in starting to use those. If we did use them we needed to find a younger person to do it for us. We needed media cover, but reviewers ignored us when we sent them brochures and free tickets. Giving our existing season ticket holders vouchers for free tickets to bring a friend, in the hopes that they might become regular attendees, was a good idea but some of the concerts were already full. If we used a ticketing agency how would we know how many tickets we had sold?
After the publicity we galloped through the menu for the fund raising supper concert and the date of the next committee meeting. The only firm decision made around the table on publicity was that one person would try to persuade the local paper to cover a piano master class we are sponsoring, and the small coup we have pulled off in persuading Marina Warner to come and do our annual lecture. As we were getting up from the table I asked the Chairman if she would like me to start approaching local branches of the U3A to advertise the concerts to their music appreciation groups. She replied loftily that everyone could do anything they liked. Which I very much doubt. I don't know what my Vires are, but I'm sure I don't have to go very far before I'm Ultra them.
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