Country Park

It occurs to me I've not written about Milton Country Park for a while and now seems like a good time as we've just sent out the last mailshot to the 8,000+ people who signed online to our petition to Save Milton Country Park last year.

Stephen and I spent much of the first half of last year leading the campaign to save the Park and we're trying not to let that tremendous wave of support for the Park go to waste. To do that our plan has been to try to persuade as many campaign supporters as possible to continue supporting the Park by becoming Friends of Milton Country Park (an organisation of which Stephen is chairman).

His vision, which I share, is to turn the Friends from a smallish paper based organisation into a much larger Internet based organisation with free membership as all communication will be via email (although he still intends to offer postal communication for the odd luddite, but there will be a charge for that to cover the costs).

To do this we first replaced the old Friends web site with a spanking new web site in the same style as the campaign web site and using the same Opus content management system to manage it. Then we set up an InfoStorm database for the Friends which will be used to store the details of each Friend.

Once all that was set up - and it's taken a while, especially the last bit which required me to do quite a lot of work to move InfoStorm forward and to set up all the linkages - we emailed all the campaign supporters inviting them to join the Friends. To make it easy for them to do that we provided them with a form on the campaign web site pre-loaded with the details they entered when they signed up to the campaign. So for those who had also filled in the questionnaire at the time it's just one click to sign up.

We sent the email close to midnight on Thursday night and so it was waiting for people as they arrived at work on Friday or their home mailboxes on Friday night or over the weekend.

We have good reasons for wanting to get as many people signed up as possible now, but I'll talk about that in another posting.