The Dance Gypsy

10 Suggestions for better service

when using the traditional (email) updating methods

The Dance Gypsy receives 100s of requests for updates every week, resulting in an ongoing backlog (typically a couple weeks, can be more or less).Although it is faster to use the automated service, the Dance Gypsy realizes that there are many very real reasons why some requests need to be processed by hand. Fortunately, there are several things you can do to help assure that your own request will be processes in a timely and accurate manner.

The ideal update request

First, some events are simply easier to process than others. I can update more listings in a timely manner if I move the easy ones to the front of the list. So here are several ideas that help you help me (and thereby help you)

And avoid:

My time priorities for dance updates

A little information about how I prioritize my available time may help you improve your own results. That is, if you know how I will respond, then you can use the approach which gets you the fastest service. So here goes, my priorities are:

(But I do understand that manual users may be stuck with that approach, the following items discriminate among the manual users)

Things that often delay postings

  1. Anything that causes spam filters to capture your message. Most common offender is bulk email lists (this doesn’t do it all by itself but it does add to their spam score). I do periodically scan the spam folder for misclassified messages, but this means that I don’t discover your email until then
  2. Attachments. First, my email system automatically strips large attachments; so I need to manually intervene to find them. even if not stripped, an attachment requires an extra step on my part. Sometimes after I have been editing postings for awhile I discover that in addition to my email program and web browser, I also have open: Word, Excel, Acrobat, iPhoto and others. This slows down my computer so I need to close the files to keep updating.
  3. Anything that confuses me. Remember that i may not be intimately familiar with your dance.
  4. Mislabeled emails (I tend to work in batches. if I am doing monthly dances and your message looks like a festival, I put it into the festival folder. later when I am doing festivals I read the details and see that it is really a monthly dance so I move it back to the other folder (for later). Similarly suppose a header says “dance July 31”, but contains information about several events. If I do not process the message until after july 31, I may throw the whole message in the trash not realizing that there are additional events.
  5. Repeated updates of the same information. This doesn’t slow your own request down, but cumulatively these slow down all requests. I actually spend more time processing repeat requests than I do the originals

Things that confuse me

Some answers are much easier to understand than others. When I get confused, I make mistakes, perhaps recording your information incorrectly. Some examples:

Items I probably can’t/don’t do

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