The British Caving Association

RodG wrote:Good for you. I too have paid the relevant fees, back in January, but until I have the BCA's official notification, in the form of a membership card, I do not consider myself a member of the BCA, nor that I am covered by the BCA insurance. A view that I am quite sure wiould be confirmed by any legal opinion.

If you wish to insist that you are not a member/not insured that is your perogative. If, however, you wish to invoke your membership/claim on your insurance then the opinion that counts would be that of BCA. I am absolutely certain that if there is a record of your payment then they will honour your insurance.

RodG wrote:Quite frankly, you comment above makes no sense whatsoever. BCA's insurance cover is only available to its members, so if your people do not pay to become BCA members, ipso facto, they are not insured. They are quite free, however, to go out and obtain insurance from any other broker. Brokers will (at a price) obtain insurance for anyone for anything within reason. Insurance, after all, is only another form of gambling.

1. But the Club needs to be insured, as a consequence of our being involved in the administration of access schemes. It is not unreasonable for that to require the inclusion of all members, as they could potentially be directly involved in this.

2. The situation outlined in (1.) above does not just apply to university clubs. I suggest that you approach the committees of some of the larger Yorkshire clubs and point out that they need to make individual membership of the National Body a compulsory requirement for membership of their club. This is simply not acceptable.

3. You suggest that alternative insurance will be available to cover such eventualities. I suggest that you go and look for it, as I have.

RodG, I think you'll find that BCA will confirm their unsubstantiated opinion is in line with my unsubstantiated opinion.

RodG wrote:until I have ... a membership card, I do not consider myself a member of the BCA, nor that I am covered by the BCA insurance. A view that I am quite sure wiould be confirmed by any legal opinion.

Nonsense. According to such a viewpoint, if I lose my credit card I am no longer a customer of my bank.

I am sorry, I do not have time to respond to all the various points in this thread in detail. I think my time is better spent trying to find out what has happened to the cards and doing something about it.

Lynne is no longer dealing with the membership admin. I collected the equipment from her on Monday and have now got it set up in my office in Hucklow. Over the next few days I will investigate to find out where we are and what remains to be done to bring everything up to date.

We have had a healthy crop of applications to take on the post of Membership Administrator and are still sifting through them in order to decide on the best choice. In the meanwhile I have made arrangements for temporary cover here in my office so that we can bring the database up to date and sort out any urgent problems before handing the system over. I do not want to land the new person with a mess to sort out as their first task!

Please bear with us a little longer while this gets sorted out. It all takes time, and it has to fit in with things which actually earn me a living as well. Just collecting the equipment was a full day out to travel from Hucklow to S. Wales and back, and even supposedly simple things like setting the computer up here so it will talk to our company network instead of being a stand-alone system as it was at Lynne's is going to be more than just one or two minutes. I'm dealing with it as quickly as I can.

Nick.

Canda@CSCC wrote: Nonsense. According to such a viewpoint, if I lose my credit card I am no longer a customer of my bank.

(Sigh) Perlease! If you must make with the analogies, at least pick one which is both appropriate, and correct.
a) If you have lost your credit card, then at some earlier period, you had received one. In the case under discussion, if you have not received the card, you cannot assume that one has been issued to you or indeed that you will ever get one. For all I know, my subscription may have been diverted into The Fund for Tired Officials of the BCA (only joking).
b) There is NO connection between your credit card account and your account with one of the High Street banks.

If you'd like some true analogies:
If you apply for a driving license, you cannot assume that you can legally drive, until you have the license in your hand. If you apply for insurance for your car, you cannot assume that you are FULLY covered until you have received the Certificate of Insurance. If you apply for Motor Vehicle Taxation, (say by post) you cannot legally take the vehicle on the road, without being in possession of and displaying the tax disk.

This thread is all rather trivial. rather like passengers on the Titanic arguing about the amount of ice in the gin and tonic, as the ship went down. The real thrust of my earlier post was that the BCA should do something about the shambolic system of membership,


RodG

RodG, you don't need your BCA card in order to be insured and a member of BCA. Check FAQ104. You've paid your money = you're covered. Oh, and BTW, your analogy re car insurance is wrong. A phone call is all that is needed for cover to be in place - you don't need to wait for the documentation to arrive before you drive around. This thread is silly.

Also, if you think a (mostly) voluntary organisation is "shambolic", why not volunteer and do something to help?

Canda@CSCC wrote: Also, if you think a (mostly) voluntary organisation is "shambolic", why not volunteer and do something to help? :wink:

I've been serving on committees, on and off for the past 50 years, and I know shambolic when I see it. I doubt it the Government could have made a worse mess of it, although it would probably have cost more. One of the best quotes I heard, made in all sincerity, by the Chairman of a saling club committee that I served on, of the Secretary, was "You can't blame him for making a bollocks of the job, since he's not being paid to do it".

RodG

Personally I imagine the task of overseeing the distribution of BCA membership cards is fraught with logistical problems. For instance:

To process one card:

Applicant's name and address are entered on a list. Presumably needing to check that their address hasn't changed and also to find out if they are re-applying for membership or whether they are a new member since if they are re-applying then they will already have a membership number.

It will be necessary to allocate them a membership type, be it CIM, DIM, caving, non-caving, joint membership etc. with the attendant complexity of registering their joint members' details on the list and checking their details, previous membership etc..

It will also be necessary to check that they are paying the correct sub - or, for the sake of simplicity, just assume that they've worked out what they need to pay and put their cheque into the bank for clearing.

Once their cheque has cleared - and it would be interesting to know how on earth someone can actually check this simply and easily without having to wait a month for the bank statement to arrive for cross-referencing - their card can be posted to them.

This needs to be done for thousands of people, therefore involving multi-thousands of checks/balances. I imagine it's an overwhelming task for one person to do.

Canda@CSCC wrote:Personally I imagine the task of overseeing the distribution of BCA membership cards is fraught with logistical problems. For instance:

To process one card:
Applicant's name and address are entered on a list. Presumably needing to check that their address hasn't changed and also to find out if .....................

Quite. The BCA have obviously ignored the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid). They that sow the seed, shall reap the harvest. If you hark back to my initial suggestion, you will see that I have this in mind. I'd go even further and suggest scrapping the non-caver category. (Why in the world do you want non-cavers in The British Caving Association, why not have a section for tennis players, etc.)
On the cheque problem, my milkman, a family business seems happy with a cheque every month, and will probably handle far more cheques a year than the BCA.

RodG

RodG wrote: Quite. The BCA have obviously ignored the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid). They that sow the seed, shall reap the harvest. If you hark back to my initial suggestion, you will see that I have this in mind. I'd go even further and suggest scrapping the non-caver category. (Why in the world do you want non-cavers in The British Caving Association, why not have a section for tennis players, etc.)

Because many caving clubs, remember, I've talked about these before, have a number of "retired" cavers on their books who are extremely useful as sources of labour and funds and who the clubs consequently do not wish to lose.

RodG wrote: On the cheque problem, my milkman, a family business seems happy with a cheque every month, and will probably handle far more cheques a year than the BCA.

I am willing to bet that he doesn't get 90% of the annual number in a two week period, though, and then get miserable gits banging on that they haven't got their receipts by return.

Many far larger businesses than this one get supply bottleneck problems. You've probably seen the "TalkTalk" adverts for free Broadband. Try signing up to it today & you may find (depending on area) that they'll agree to connect you in September.

Having resolved some problematic IT issues, I now have the membership database computer and card printer up and running again, and sorting out the missing cards is the top priority.

So far as I can tell, there are around 150 - 200 (out of about 4000) CIM and DIM cards which have not yet been sent out. It's only a small proportion but make no mistake, I see this as unacceptable and will be working to resolve the problem as soon as possible. It's too early to make any commitments but my current thinking is that we should be able to get these cards out within the space of one or two weeks.

If anyone has an urgent need for a card (e.g. because they have a trip lined up and evidence of membership is required) please e-mail me at membership@british-caving.org.uk and I'll try to deal with it with the appropriate priority.

Nick.

RodG wrote:
I have been told that the membership cards for club registered cavers were all handed out to the various club secretaries in the first few weeks of January, long before the club secretaries could possibly be aware of who was and who was not going to renew their membership. How anyone can possibly audit, or keep track of the revenue from the sale of insurance cover is quite beyond me.

I dont like to boast but.....

I am a club treasurer, my club has over 100 members. With the help of a membership list and a couple of emails to Lynne who was the administrator of the insurance scheme at the time, I found the system of collecting BCA insurance together with the annual subs for the members of my club, quite a simple task this year. 95% of the members of my club had their BCA cards by Feb this year. The other 5% were delayed slightly due to changes in membership category, eg moving from CNC to CC.

Admittedly, I did have to make a few changes to the way I keep our membership records, but by aligning our membership database with the BCA database, the admin became quite simple. As Lynne said in an email to me "If only all clubs were as flexible and accommodating as you. I do have fun and games with juggling 5000 members!!!!"