Fixing the #passvotes problem

Following up on my last post, it looks like PASS has addressed the election issues.  The gist of the fix is:

• The voting deadline has been extended to October 14.
• Members have until October 5 to update and validate your account.  Go do this.

My thanks to the PASS Board of Directors to doing the right thing on this.  As an organization, you should always be concerned with the care and service of your current membership.  I still have one question, though:  Are we addressing the symptom or are we fixing the problem?

The last week and the issues that came out of it were a mess and the Board make a great effort to fix it.  But this isn’t a long term fix, this was simply a one time repair of the the problems caused by the change in process.  What I want to know is what PASS is doing to prevent a similar problem next year?  My suggestions to PASS are:

• You can not rely on email to communicate changes like this.  Make sure you are leveraging other methods (Twitter, blog posts, LinkedIn).
• If accounts need to be validated, build this validation into the website.  Force members to update/review their profile when they log in.

Now that I’ve been burned by this, I will certainly pay more attention to how PASS is managing my account.  However, PASS needs to think about folks who aren’t as vigilant and be proactive about communicating changes.  Connect, learn, and share isn’t a one way street.