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What do I expect from IET – Community - France & Paris.

Former Community Member
Former Community Member
Firstly who are the IET Fr MIET members?

I joined this PEI in 1980 from Grenoble. I was on substantive leave from MoD. I decided to stay for a longer period and got married here. At that time we were the first to come over with the EU agreements of that period.

There were already ex-patriot UK people with huge benefits living here, there were the UK EU adventurers with no objectives but work was abundant, there were the first student exchanges, and some had married into French families. I did not meet any UK people who simply came here to live and work at that time.

 

Most of us found the difference between the UK and France as difficult as between the UK and China. They just did not live, eat or drink like us.

 

I was advised by the first UK settlers to just join in and enjoy myself, which I did.

I first met French culture when I organised the “entente cordiale” between the Concorde R&D groups of UK RAE and French ONERA. It was unbelievable, when the opportunity to have a job and career change came, I took up nuclear engineering in France.

 

I returned to the UK which had drastically changed – Thatcher, strikes, riots. My name  was plagiarised in my work. I had to leave the UK after my employers failed to protect me. I returned to France.

The first time every one talked of the quality of life in France, the second time it was the Iraqi wars and crisis.

 

So what do you need to work and survive in France now and how can the IET French Community help.

France is huge; it is not realistic to travel from SE or SW France for a meeting in Paris.

Maybe we need a newcomers guide such as most French towns give to new arrivals.

France is still totally different from the UK.

We have different categories of IET members who are at least engineering & technology related.

 -Ex-patriot, UK enterprise sales & marketing staff, Erasmus students, Enterprises from the UK that have delocalised with their staff, those that have married into families, entrepreneurs and SMEs in IT technology and those that now just want to work and live in France etc.

What would you advise
  • Should we have a MIET arrivals’ guide

  • Should we have guides to French language courses

  • Should we have guides to CPD in France

  • Should we give advice on French administration

  • What about the dos and don’ts of French culture.


Or should we just mind our own business and keep it to ourselves?

 

I recommend reading : Stephen Clarke – 1000 years of annoying the French and other titles and most of his references. French English history is not as taught in schools.
  •  Out of season hotels in France are cheap, maybe one or two visits with IET families or friends to E&T venues could be affordable.


And the French Community AGM & voting should be on line and at distance.

I’m retiring from E&T have fun in France

 

Give Rob McCann some help

 

John Gowman MIET (ex ITEME Grenobl 1980)

 

  • 0
    Lisa Miles


    there are around 100 IET Local Networks, 40% of them outside the UK and many of them have no problems with utilising the services provided by the Communities Team



    I have a couple of problems with this, Lisa:

    • "many of them have no problems", leaving some who do have problems?

    • and, more seriously, there is no problem using the services which Adestra and the communities team offer, and to avoid any misunderstanding I know the communities team do their best - that's not the issue.  My concern is that we are (appear to be) using these services without assessing their effectiveness.  There seems to be evidence that the message is not getting through yet we carry on (blindly?) using the services in the hope that it will do the job.


    Maybe the stats from Linsay will put my concerns to rest.


    There is also a more fundamental problem: once someone is unsubscribed from email (eg Adestra) services, there is no way for us to reach them.  We cannot email them and ask whether they might like to reconsider, or tell them that things have changed and offer them the chance to re-subscribe.  Once we've lost them, we've lost them for good.  We did consider a message enclosed with the annual subscription round inviting people to (re)join this or that, but I think even this was disallowed by the DP regulations.  So, while there may well be technical problems, as Mike seems to be suggesting, we also need to consider the possibility that the subscribe flag is simply not set, for whatever reason.  Which is why the stats from Linsay might be helpful.


    Keith

  • 0
    Hi Keith Parr‍ I've not personally come across any other LN that has had issues regarding using the Communities Team to distribute emails to the membership on behalf of the LN volunteers and neither have I heard of any others via my colleagues.  During my time as a Regional Co-ordinator/Local Network Development Executive and Community Relationship Manager I only ever came across one LN in all of those that I've supported over the years, that has been reluctant to use the services of the IET Staff in the Communities Team in broadcasting their email publicity... and that was IET France blush 


    Of course we assess the effectiveness of our email campaigns by interrogating the reports that each campaign generates to tell us the open and click ratios of those emails etc. If IET France were to start using Adestra then all this information is available to the volunteers too but as I've said on many occasions now, speak to your IET Staff Contact and they can extract this information for you if needs be.


    The old saying  'You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink' applies here I think. We can send out thousands of emails but if no one wants to open and read them then there's very little we can do to change that. This is why we recommend using alternative methods of publicising activities such as social media, putting up posters, press releases etc again all of which is something that your IET Staff contact can advise on or assist with...


    Apologies for any glaring spelling mistakes I may have made in my text, I spend so much of my time in France now I'm beginning to think of English as my second language... wink




  • 0
    Reply to John Gowman,

    When the IEE French Centre had to change to become the IET French Local Network we were promised legal help from London. This, unsurprisingly, never materialised but the process was closed out with an EGM which lasted 16 minutes under my chairmanship entirely in French since we were talking about a French legal entity. Two members of IET staff had their travel expenses paid to attend this meeting but they were not allowed to sign the attendance sheet since they did not qualify for membership of the French legal entity and they probably didn't understand very much of what was said and what decisions we took. I can only hope that they were satisfied that they were spending IET money advisedly.


    The Loi 1901 has all sorts of interpretations as I have seen in my capacity as Président of too many. And, since one of my passports is British, some of these were populated with Brits who thought fit to try and teach me how the law works, even though they were unable to do this in French. Fortunately, "Plan B" has always worked to achieve our objectives.


    I hope that I have set the record straight. On the other hand, much of what you write in your personal blogs is pretty common knowledge and the IET French LN has tried to do its best to kowtow to instructions from galactic HQ with the results that you have seen personally. But it is disingenuous to suggest that the IET French LN volunteers do not go out of their way to welcome participants at their meetings (quote the Paris crowd kept to themselves as usual.). This has always been a priority ever since our "gang of four" set up the IEE in France in 1988 in total ignorance of the Loi 1901.


    And... my Czech registered Diesel car has a macaron to enter Paris on bleak days!
  • 0

    • In most of France the density of MIETs is probablty too low to permit local area meetups; I personally would struggle to justify more than 1 hour drive from where I live, and that would have to be for an exceptionally interesting meeting - remember we have to drive home too!




    Hi William Davis‍ 


    Don't let that put you off organising engineering related activities for non IET members in your local area though! Again if you have a chat with my colleague Lynsay Callaghan‍ she'll be able to help you out by sending a message to members locally to you on your behalf. Just let her know the target audience i.e. distance from yourself and give her the text of what you want to say. Then if they want to make contact with you directly then they can. It's something I've done myself many times before for members within the LN's I supported back in the day. smiley


    I'm actually considering organising an event about lightning protection in my local village hall in France.... wink We get some awesome thunderstorms in the mountains where I am down South...
  • 0
    As the current Community Manager working with the France Local Network, the volunteers in the area are happy to work with the IET to help them grown the LN and we are happy to offer help and advice to them.  


    We have 352 members throughout France with around 70% contactable by the IET by email.  This figure includes people who we have email address for but who have chosen that they do not wish to receive correspondence from us.  If you meet anyone who does not receive emails and decide that they want to, you can pass them my details or they can change their options on MyIET.


    The Freance LN are currently working away on their objectives, how to reach out to the membership, Kick-starting a program Jointly with other institutions, finding more volunteers to assist, reviewing past events and looking at future events.


    We are looking at a write up of what has been happening in the LN over the past year and highlighting ideas for the future, a message from the current Chair, putting out an email to all of those who have registered to receive emails highlighting the post, asking them to get involved, get in touch or let us know of anything they can suggest for activity.   


    We are also looking at how other LNs that cover a large area work with districts within the main committee, so if we get a few interested people from one area then we can link them up to work together.  

     

    All of this takes time and the LN has been inactive for quite a while, so this is a huge step forward and the volunteers that are leading on this should be applauded.
  • 0
    I have to admire the confidence of HQ staff!

    To say "We have 352 members throughout France with around 70% contactable by the IET by email." is having blind confidence in the e-mail system. How many times do we have to underline that many Members do not receive these e-mails? The 70% figure is theoretical. It is not a question of "Options" but of reliability of the IET's e-mail system which is just not working. There is a black hole somewhere that needs to be identified and fixed.
  • 0
    Thank you Lynsay, that information is a step forward, at least it is for me <smile>.


    Please can you help further by providing the percentage of those who are in theory contactable by email, ie we have their contact details, but who have chosen to opt out of being contacted?


    Saying this, I am assuming (!) that the members whose "do not contact" flag is set have actually chosen to opt out.  There were some concerns at one point that there were problems with the way the data had been migrated from an old to a new system and the "do not contact" flag had been set in error.  Is there any way you might be able to think of by which we can ask opted-out members to check their settings and correct them if necessary?


    Keith

  • 0
    Keith Parr‍ , unfortunately I cannot pull that data from the system and would have to reques a full data a list.  That can take up to 10 working days and would not really add anything extra to this disucssion.   We have to respect members decisions when they chose to opt out.   We moved to the 'new' system over 10 years ago, and before I started at the IET.  Once we discovered that there had been an issue we did contact the members that had opted out with a message and we currently still do on occasions.   We also advise people to check their own IET settings and then they can choose which areas they get communications from.  


    This is a question we get asked a lot from LNs - how many of the members in my areas do we reach by emails, but as Lisa Miles‍  has stated, this is why we recommend using alternative methods of publicising activities such as social media, putting up posters, press releases, keeping the community page up to date etc.  One method does not reach everyone, so links with universities, companies and joint events with other institutions increases awareness.
  • 0
    Lynsay Callaghan


    Perhaps unsurprisingly, I disagree!  We know that we cannot reach 25% of IET members in France by email as we have no email address for them, but it seems we don't know what proportion of the email addresses we do have are valid / can be used to communicate with members.  If we don't know that then what confidence can we have that any emails that we send out will be effective?


    I understand that for any given (Adestra) mailing we can tell, easily, how many messages bounced, were delivered, were opened, and perhaps more.  One might reasonably expect that the total number of messages sent would be included in any such report, but even if not we might reasonably assume that total messages sent = messages delivered + messages undelivered?  The total number of messages sent would then be pretty close to the number of members we can actually address by email, or so I would have thought.


    Given that it's a question frequently asked by LNs, it's clearly important and I would have thought we would want to have ready answers!


    Where we do agree, however, is the importance of broad exposure, but that's really difficult to achieve effectively.  I understand that there are LNs who have used social media very effectively to reach their audience, especially perhaps the important younger segments of the target market, maybe there are lessons to be learned there.


    Keith

  • Former Community Member
    0 Former Community Member

    Keith Parr:

     




    "don't know [...] what proportion of members are signed up to receive email communications"



    I find that a bit worrying, it says to me we are using a tool without knowing its effectiveness.  Surely it's not enough to say "I sent it via Adestra" thinking that one is addressing "the membership" when in fact one is addressing some (unknown?) part of the membership.  [Mike's post only serves to underline the importance of really understanding what is (not) happening.]

     

     




    Hi Keith Parr‍ , that's not quite what I said! I don't know the actual figures because I don't look. I leave the detail to Lynsay and the marketing team - in my position I just get the headlines unless I ask. We definitely know its effectiveness and are provided with a fearsome amount of data. The marketers of this world are far better equipped to analyse the interpret the data than I am.


    But, out of interest, I did ask a colleague to dig out some information from me. I've found that only 10 email campaigns have gone out from the France LN workspace in the last decade. One was for an SGM, two of them look like they were re-engagement campaigns to unsubscribers, and another looks like it went out to young members only, so those data sets are very small. The six remaining campaigns all look like events or technical visits of some type. The last email about the annual dinner was opened by 40% of recipients and 3.8% of them clicked through. That might not sound much, but it's actually a pretty decent return.


    Looking at the total number of emails sent out since we've been using this system:

     


    • 2752 data entries (this will include duplicates because we use "fresh" data for each campaign) have been uploaded into the France LN workspace and 90% of those have been "attempted". The 10% that were not attempted are entries that are likely to have been suppressed by Adestra's unsubscribe list that is accumulated across those whole IET.

    • Of the "attempted" emails, all but 12 were actually delivered. It's likely that they bounced due to inboxes no longer being active.

    • 34% of all delivered emails were opened

    • 10% of the opened had the user click and follow a link


    This does suggest that the vast majority of emails are actually being delivered. The open rate for France is also quite good, so it doesn't quite fit the narrative that there's a fundamental issue with the emails in France. I've looked at Keith's and John's data profile in Adestra and can see that you received and opened the last email for France. Keith - you opened it 15 times so you must've been keen wink

    Michael Wrigley‍ I can see that you've not interacted with any France LN emails (so the system hasn't tried to send them to you) and that you haven't unsubscribed, so I've asked someone to look into why this has happened. I'm hoping there's a simple explanation.

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