Way Over the Top

In Getting The Most of The Pie I demonstrated how the GRBA's Facebook page leans toward favoritism, showcasing a mere handful of its members, over and again, while neglecting most others. I identified a Top Five who are the beneficiaries of this bias. Well, things just went way over the top. In just a few days, one of those traders was the sole subject of five posts, four publicising its campaign to raise funds for charity by donating all the proceeds of coffee sales on a particular day. The fifth was a re-posting of a favourable online review.

Raising funds for charity is great. If you want to publicise your charitable fundraising as a way of attracting customers, that's fine. You are entitled to be competitive. But the Goodwood Road Business Association has a responsibility to not one, but ALL of the cafes within its bounds. It does not do for an organisation obligated to all of them to beg the public to get their coffee at this one, favoured, cafe. It is not the role of a business association to divert custom away from any of its members. It's a betrayal. It destroys trust.

Favoritism not only breeds resentment, it makes everyone worry about whether its okay to criticize the organisation or its office-bearers; whether there's a price to be paid; whether you'll get pushed even further down the list of favourites and your turn to shine will never come. The result? Silence. Stultification. Lacklustre performance. The organisation gets an exaggerated idea of its overall success and its level of acceptance because no one's prepared to say what they really think.

We traders pay a compulsory levy and we would all like our share of the benefits. It looks particularly bad when a recipient of this sort of disproportionate exposure is on the Committee of the GRBA. 

Getting The Most of The Pie

There have been rumbles of discontent in the Precinct. I've heard angry whispers. Tears have been shed. The story I've heard is that particular businesses have been receiving favourable treatment.

When I hear stories like this, it is not my habit to swallow them whole. I like to check the facts, see if there is any substance.

So I did a quick survey of the GRBA's "Goodwood Road" Facebook page http://facebook.com/GoodwoodAlive/ to see if anyone was getting more than their fair share of promotion. The GRBA's Co-ordinator posts on the page several times a week. To get an idea whether certain businesses were in fact getting disproportionate exposure, I looked at 40 consecutive posts. 

 34 businesses were mentioned. There are around 80 businesses in the Precinct: 21 were mentioned only once, 13 were mentioned more than once, while around 46 were not mentioned at all. Of those mentioned more than once, 8 were mentioned twice, while a lucky handful were mentioned multiple times. These were: The Capri Theatre (6 mentions), Two Sisters Food and Wine Bar (5 mentions), The Boulangerie (4 mentions), Trouble and Strife (4 mentions) and The Community Centre (not a business) (4 mentions).

Let's call these fortunate establishments the Top Five. They got 38% of the 60 business mentions. Not exactly even-handed.

"Others" includes 29 businesses mentioned either once or twice. So 15% of the businesses got 38% of the mentions.

It gets even more disproportionate when you look at how often the Top Five were the sole subject of a post. (Some posts mention more than one business, others feature one business only. These figures are about the latter.) The Boulangerie (3 sole mentions), The Capri Theatre (4 sole mentions), Two Sisters Food and Wine Bar, (1 sole mention), Trouble and Strife (2 sole mentions).

Of the posts mentioning one business only, 45% were of the Top Five, amply supporting the rumours of favourable treatment.

There were 22 sole mentions: 10 of these were about the Top 5.

Other biases in evidence: 57% of mentions were cafes/restaurants/eateries and regrettably you were far more likely to get a mention if you were of white anglo extraction rather than Asian. Only one Asian eatery got a sole mention. An astonishing nine were lumped together in one post. 

I was sad to discover that, in this sample at least, people's suspicions were true. The businesses they suspected of getting favourable treatment are indeed getting it. I'm not saying it's intentional. It may be quite unintentional. But it's happening. And it isn't fair.