Regional Administrative Officer
From Pirate Party UK Wiki
The RAOs were removed from the Constitution by majority party vote on 21st November 2011.
Regional Administrative Officers (often shortened to RAOs) are responsible for party organisation at a regional level and have been informally elected by a vote of all members in their area. There is no formal term limit for RAOs.
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Responsibilities
RAOs are responsible for:
- Organising member activity such as meets and events in that region.
- Assessing and approving Parliamentary candidates and Regional (Welsh Assembly, Scottish Parliament, London Assembly) candidates.
- Assisting the campaigns team, candidates, and election agents with organising volunteers and activists to support their campaign effort.
- Appointing deputies from their region, to assist with performing their role.
- Anything else which may be relevant and useful to the development of the Pirate Party in their region.
Current RAOs
- Chris Monteiro, Greater London
- Stephen Ogden, South East England
- Lucas Abedecain, South West England
- Daniel Newman, West Midlands
- Jack Allnutt, North West England
- Andrew Paliwoda, Scotland
- Vivan Jayant, Yorkshire and Humberside
There is currently no RAO for North East England, East Midlands, East of England, Northern Ireland or Wales.
Knowing your regional members, and communicating with them
One of the most important functions of the RAO is to keep in touch with and organise the members in your region. One easy way to do this is to make use of the mass emailing administrative function. Currently this system needs tweaking to provide access for RAOs, so until then mass emails can be sent out via the member communications officer.
Another way to email regional members, is directly, but this requires access to regional party member information. To obtain access to this information, contact the Data Controller to request a Data Protection Act (DPA) form. Signing this form makes it clear that the RAO agrees to keep the data confidential, and also provides their agreement to destroy all forms of the data in their possession when they no longer require access to it.
Once obtained, this data does allow you to directly access email addresses of your regional members, which you can use for your own mass emails. RAOs are strongly advised to understand the mechanisms by which they undertake mass emails so as not to inadvertently reveal any members email address to other members. Manual bulk emails should always use BCC. It is however preferable to use a mail merge solution that allows you to preview emails prior to them being sent. A mail merge will also allow you to email members with information more specific to their location within the region (e.g. can email just the members in a particular City asking for a good venue idea for that city's next meeeting).
Member data is also useful to profile the regional members, and to get an idea of member-density across the region. This can be invaluable in locating meetings in cities that actually have members.