I’ve been going through the wonderful experience of applying for a Rotary matching grant, for our Antigua project, in a new system. I’ve been our districts guinea pig as I was way ahead of anyone else in the district.
This meant I ran into technical problems, like, the online application system wouldn’t take my entries for all of the financial information because, “it doesn’t work when you use a Chrome browser on a Mac.” What? You’ve got to be kidding that they didn’t test it on all popular browsers on iOS, Windows and Linux.
I also ran into confusion on exactly what was required for the new system. I uncovered things that our district officials didn’t know, even after the couple years of extensive preparation that Rotary gave these officials.
Finally, I, and my friends in Antigua, received a long email with what appeared to be onerous requirements. It irritated me and they panicked in Antigua. I left a nice message, had a conference call with some managers and got things settled. One of the things they told me was that a lot of what they wrote was for future consideration to assure sustainability.
I take all of the above and summarize it by saying that the people at The Rotary Foundation are really poor communicators, especially in writing. This also points out that our goal is to make the complex simple for our clients and customers (not making the simple complex, and frustrating, as the people at Rotary did for me).
“If you haven’t found something strange during the day, it hasn’t been much of a day.” Physicist John A. Wheeler
