Friday, October 19, 2007

Mailing deadline achieved

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Today the final version of the Spiritual Capital research project survey questionnaire went into the post, nearly 270 envelopes in the end, to all the religious communities for which an address could be found in the City and Borough of Cardiff. Thanks to the hard labours of Roy Thomas who has been managing the project for us over the past six months, I've had nothing to do with the hard practicalities of doing a big mail-shot that I've been party to setting up. This is the first, time I've not had to manage it myself I recall, when I look back over the number of mass mailings I've done over the year - back to my time in USPG circulating over 600 parishes across Wales, parishioner mailing lists and so forth.

There's less need for things like this today, since it's become possible to use the internet to make enquiries and distribute information. Mind you, I just hate those little pop-up surveys which appear and block my view of an article I'm trying to scan quickly. The monthly diocesan distribution of church publicity materials is now done via the diocesan website to save paper, and people can ask for hard-copies if they are not web users. This doesn't prevent tons of ecclesiastical junk mail from others arriving through the post however - people selling furniture for church halls, maintenance equipment, vestment catalogues, various missionary societies, charity appeals - especially at this time of year. All this has to be sorted through before binning or reading/passing on/using. Our survey adds to this mountain of paper.

I only hope that recipients realise that this envelope is a 'one-off', and that a reply will be beneficial to the position of all Cardiff's religious communities when the research is publicised next year.

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