Options for action against the board

[BowenBoys]

For those of us who are unhappy with recent developments, what action can we, individually or collectively, do?

As I don't have a season ticket I can, and will, withdraw match day financial support. I'm not well enough to go to games at the moment but will no longer purchase match streams.

Have also withdrawn my support for the club through RedYellow.Org.

Anything else I can do?

[lady-isobel-barnett]

29 minutes ago, BowenBoys said:

For those of us who are unhappy with recent developments, what action can we, individually or collectively, do?

As I don't have a season ticket I can, and will, withdraw match day financial support. I'm not well enough to go to games at the moment but will no longer purchase match streams.

Have also withdrawn my support for the club through RedYellow.Org.

Anything else I can do?

Get better soon  

[jagfox]

Aye, take care of yourself Phil. 

[elevenone]

Indeed.  Get well soon.

[BowenBoys]

Thanks jagfox & elevenone.

I want my club back. What do we do?

[jagfox]

7 minutes ago, BowenBoys said:

Thanks jagfox & elevenone.

I want my club back. What do we do?

It seems the club have decided PTFC Trust is the vehicle for the share holding. That is very open to question. 

TJF would not give us that necessarily. To get proper fan ownership we would need to get saving up enough to buy a controlling interest in the club. But maybe I'm jumping ahead a tad 

[sandy]

Personally, ‘not a penny more’ this season is all I can do. Money talks so if enough of us withdraw further financial support, it might force 3BC to have a rethink.

I cannot with a conscience spend more on the Jags while our fans do not have a voice. Short term pain for longer term gain. My subs to TJF continue, that’s a route open to others so the money can be used for the Club when the outlook has improved.

[Dick Dastardly]

20 minutes ago, sandy said:

Personally, ‘not a penny more’ this season is all I can do. Money talks so if enough of us withdraw further financial support, it might force 3BC to have a rethink.

I cannot with a conscience spend more on the Jags while our fans do not have a voice. Short term pain for longer term gain. My subs to TJF continue, that’s a route open to others so the money can be used for the Club when the outlook has improved.

It needs more than a rethink. Once the shares are transferred, TBC can't take them back and say they have changed their mind ..... Unless the PTFC Trust are such puppets that the board can tell them to transfer the shares to another party. Once transferred, the ownership battle is over.

[Fawlty Towers]

I can't make the game tomorrow due to the rail disruption but will be booing from my living room if the camera swings up to the directors box.

[Mr Scruff]

I'm done.

This is so much not 'our club' that it's brutally tainted.  And I can't support any part of this setup; how dare they take us for mugs.  Shows of protest etc feel meaningless. These people do not care.

Our group were arranging our Friday night game the other day.  None of us (4) are going now.  If anyone wants my season ticket PM me and I can try to get it to you (JL stand).

Unless something changes I won't be back.  Not through protest, but by the distaste I feel deep down.  

I might get to away games and take in televised games, but they can go and fornicate themselves.

[MarciaBlaine]

1 hour ago, BowenBoys said:

Thanks jagfox & elevenone.

I want my club back. What do we do?

I hope you feel better soon!

I'm still waiting to see what the broader approach is for TJF - if they are to be a vehicle for protest then I'll support that 100%, but if not I'm certain another body will evolve (and I'll gladly be in it). 

[MarciaBlaine]

5 hours ago, BowenBoys said:

Thanks jagfox & elevenone.

I want my club back. What do we do?

Some more practical suggestions for people are (apologies if I'm repeating myself here from earlier):

• Contacting the club as much as possible. Here's the thing: A single complaint about 10 things is brushed off as easily as a single complaint about one thing. 10 single complaints are ten times the work, hassle, pressure. I know this from an awful former existence answering complaints!
• So each time you don't spend money, contact them. Each time you have something new to complain about, communicate or ask, send it in. Just about every organisation (and hopefully PTFC) have a system for managing the huge amount of contact they get. It needs to be logged/referenced, handed over/between people, signed off and completed. They need to be able to look back on this and have a record of how it was dealt with, and that takes work. Equally, they need to know who's dealing with item X or Y at any given time, which is again a major hassle for them. They're not mass-deleting emails in a shared Outlook box (at least I really hope they're not!), they're trying to run a CRM-style system where every one of your messages goes onto the big 'to-do' pile whether they like its content or not. So multiply, multiply, multiply.
• Don't make yourself easily ignorable -for example: if they can spy one of your CAPS LOCK EMAILS, sweary f*****n letters or shouty phone calls from twenty paces, each one of them will be easy to dismiss. So be firm but polite. Don't get personal. Ask genuine questions. Be a horde of midges, not a Tasmanian devil.
• Reply to previous messages - this can often get you to the front of the queue and will also somewhat validate your contact as legitimate rather than ignorable. It also often obliges people to respond because it's part of an ongoing conversation.
• Try not to be 'cookie-cutter' - for example 20 people sending in an identically-worded email with the signature changed. It's again easily dismissed because whoever has to deal with it has already decided what to do with it when they read the first one. I know it's more effort but it's worth it.
• Worth noting that you can make your emails extra midge-like by attaching a picture (say, a picture of the tenner you didn't spend - also an effective visual [see below]). This makes the email literally 100 times bigger in size for their servers and the mailbox size is likely limited in some way. So gumming up the mailbox is an option and it may also put your emails to the front of the queue by default
• As it's a numbers game, it's also imperative that you stack up the numbers by not giving up! You'll absolutely be expected to tail off after a while ("Och, it'll die down by tomorrow"). Anyone can handle a wee spike in workload. Nobody can handle it perpetually. 
• Visibility is everything, so try to find ways to let others see the discontent mount up. Basically, find ways to hang this dirty laundry in public, otherwise it's just you talking to a screen. An invisible crisis isn't much of a crisis. This is tricky but things like social media are an obvious one. The press can be awfy lazy these days and will take social media messages and reactions as indicative of the whole support.
• *edit to add on visibility* Press attention is huge. There's a saying in the Cooncil that half a page in the Evening Times is worth a couple of thousand complaints! People care deeply about how they're portrayed in public.
• Still on visibility, any kind of repeatable image is gold dust. I used the example earlier of chants at games versus a visual, though equally a video clip of a disgruntled stand chanting is 1000 times more effective than a sentence about it. But for example there's a reason why companies always (ALWAYS) include an image in their tweets - people are drawn to a a visual and the data behind social media engagement backs this up by an order of magnitude. So always remember that visuals (particularly shareable ones) win over words. (I'll note that t-shirts are visual Phil...)
• Seize the memes of production! A simple slogan wins the war of the story - something that encapsulates our message succinctly. There are actually fairly scientific ways to do this (the book I read on this was from the Centre for Story Based Strategy in the US), and countless examples of it working well. In my view this messaging is best arrived at by having a wee group of folk to talk through the issue. But the key messages/slogans can also self-germinate if they hit the mark and are shared widely.

Some thoughts anyway.

I realise it looks like I'm putting myself about for leading the charge but I literally don't do leadership! I'm a firm believer in the means matching the ends - in this case bringing about group ownership by working as a group. So I'd be happy to work with others on this.

ETA: I know I've repeatedly said "the club" above but the same holds for contacting the Trust (or the media) etc too

Edited August 18, 2022 by MarciaBlaine

[MarciaBlaine]

4 minutes ago, denismcquadeno.eleven said:

You’re suggestion about people in the stand turning their backs was a good one. In fact, you’ve put up many ‘good ones’ but I’m afraid to say, I don’t sense that there’s a feeling for taking action in protest at the stadium on a match day, or probably any other day for that matter on here. I think people are waiting for something to ‘turn up’. It’s very sad, because, I think it’s all going to end with 3BCs winning the day. Perhaps it has to do with the kind of supporters that follow PTFC, that maybe protest is considered anathema.

I think you're right about overt protest, at least for now. It really needs a tipping point to be meaningful and not look daft. Shame, I'd be up for it!

[sandy]

9 minutes ago, MarciaBlaine said:

I think you're right about overt protest, at least for now. It really needs a tipping point to be meaningful and not look daft. Shame, I'd be up for it!

Let’s wait till 1 Sept EGM, something may well come from that. The issue is not going to go away or ‘die down’.

[MarciaBlaine]

If I was a BBC director I'd have someone set up with a camera in the Aitken Suite at 5:59pm tomorrow. You'd have to imagine the Trust guys will be talking to some pretty stony faces at best. Another way to get a visual and some publicity, for those who feel they can go? It doesn't take many people to fill a camera lens.

[Third Lanark]

7 hours ago, BowenBoys said:

For those of us who are unhappy with recent developments, what action can we, individually or collectively, do?

As I don't have a season ticket I can, and will, withdraw match day financial support. I'm not well enough to go to games at the moment but will no longer purchase match streams.

Have also withdrawn my support for the club through RedYellow.Org.

Anything else I can do?

Hope your feeling better soon Phil

[Lenziejag]

It’s going to come down to results, how the fans react. However, I don’t see how what has gone on in the last couple of weeks can’t affect the players - pretty sure last weeks result is an indication of that.

A couple more bad results and the supporters will be behind any kind of protest, I would think.

[Lenziejag]

On 8/19/2022 at 7:26 AM, denismcquadeno.eleven said:

That’s the saddest thing of all. The performance of the team is irrelevant to the much more important battle being fought successfully (by 3BCs/PTFC board) off-field that we need to be fighting and trying to win, (over the control of the club and its future, which will affect what happens at Firhill for years to come.) The ‘opposition’ have played a blinder SO FAR make no mistake about that  winning every skirmish so far. They’ve seen off every challenge and come out on top. Are we going to turn things around in the ‘final minutes’, or is it going to be another ‘if only’?

What I mean and I have said before, those in favour of fan ownership at least in terms of those who have signed up are still in the minority. The attendance last night wasn’t too far away from what you would expect from a televised game. Half time draw prize money wasn’t too much down either, I don’t think. After last night’s performance and result do you think fans will be staying away ?

[sandy]

1 hour ago, Lenziejag said:

What I mean and I have said before, those in favour of fan ownership at least in terms of those who have signed up are still in the minority. The attendance last night wasn’t too far away from what you would expect from a televised game. Half time draw prize money wasn’t too much down either, I don’t think. After last night’s performance and result do you think fans will be staying away ?

There was no call to action to stay away last night. 

[Lenziejag]

45 minutes ago, sandy said:

There was no call to action to stay away last night. 

Will there be ? Just to TJF or the whole support ? 

[sandy]

2 hours ago, Lenziejag said:

Will there be ? Just to TJF or the whole support ? 

That’s what I imagine the EGM will help decide once feedback from TJF members has been gathered & analysed. 

[Lenziejag]

10 hours ago, sandy said:

That’s what I imagine the EGM will help decide once feedback from TJF members has been gathered & analysed. 

If this is on the table for the EGM, I would say that the Thistle board would have been quite right to ban TJF presence on Friday night.

[sandy]

14 minutes ago, Lenziejag said:

If this is on the table for the EGM, I would say that the Thistle board would have been quite right to ban TJF presence on Friday night.

I think you are pre-empting what the members feedback says. As the Club would have been too.

What did the Club hope to gain by the ban? I struggle to understand this. We are a democratic country, plurality of views is healthy. TJF reps would have been handing out pin badges and discussing the benefits of membership of an organisation that had committed to raising funds for the Club. All it achieved was angering a section of the support. 

Much work has been put in to rebuild TJF along professional lines. Elections, carefully thought out proposals, experienced business people taking to 3BC. And yet the door was slammed in our face.

It was the final straw for me. ‘Not a penny more’ this season I’m afraid till meaningful change happens. 

[Lenziejag]

1 hour ago, sandy said:

I think you are pre-empting what the members feedback says. As the Club would have been too.

What did the Club hope to gain by the ban? I struggle to understand this. We are a democratic country, plurality of views is healthy. TJF reps would have been handing out pin badges and discussing the benefits of membership of an organisation that had committed to raising funds for the Club. All it achieved was angering a section of the support. 

Much work has been put in to rebuild TJF along professional lines. Elections, carefully thought out proposals, experienced business people taking to 3BC. And yet the door was slammed in our face.

It was the final straw for me. ‘Not a penny more’ this season I’m afraid till meaningful change happens. 

It was you that mentioned the EGM in the 1st place. However, to put forward a case. PTFC is a business. If one of the future actions of TJF is to undermine that business, in my opinion they would be well within their rights to ban them from the premises even before any decisions are taken. 

[eljaggo]

I think it is vital that TJF conducts a specific survey of its season ticket holding members as soon as possible.  The survey should establish what they see as important to them and by that to define as exactly as possible where their best interests lie.

If that is not done, then the PTFC Trust can claim that any action they may take can be construed as being in the best interests of season ticket holders.  That could lead to all sorts of issues, especially if a new investor appears on the horizon and offers to buy the Weir shares coupled to promises of new investment.

TJF at the moment is the only organisation who can speak for a large proportion of season ticket holders, and the results of such a survey would give a benchmark against which future discussions can take place.