2d (edited) • General discussion
COMMS : Service Requests and more...
The sites we serve keep paper or digital "comm books" where they notate any happenings with their residents and this information gets passed from shift to shift, with aides and med techs initialing the entries as they read them:
Bessy fell and broke her hip this morning at 11:00am on the way out of the dining room. Is now admitted to which hospital.
Clark is returning from his hip surgery and care at a skilled nursing at 03:00pm.
Mable got into a fight with her table mate Josie at lunch over the cute new guy who just moved into apartment 311 and Mable now has a minor skin tear from Josie's fork. Josie is banned from the dining room for the rest of the week. (Okay, not sure how that works exactly. But these things DO happen.)
As we progress as performers and business people, the demand for our services goes up, and keeping good communication records that make life easier and not harder for ourselves, AND our clients needs to be a priority. I brought this up in another thread, but here's a recap :
Some LED's are notorious for replying to your latest invoice, or an unrelated thread, with a service request. I'd prefer they start a new service request email thread, with ALL details laid out from the start, but this would create more work for them, and we don't want to be "difficult to work with."
So yes, we CAN in fact be there for your event on May 29th, but at what TIME do you need this?
03:30pm, great. But what's the budget? And is this indoors, or outdoors?
Okay, it's at 05:00pm, and 90min@$200. Was this a themed event, or just general music, and is that "wallpaper" or "featured entertainment."
We now have all the details, spread over five or six different emails, under a subject heading that has nothing to do with May 29th (and which year, but the way???).
So my newly adopted "comms protocol" is to immediately reply with the following template (if you use Gmail, or probably most other email services, you can create templates to quickly reply to common inquiries without typing them all up every.single.time.) AND in every reply to that thread after this is inserted, I am copy/pasting the "event specs" so they are always in my latest reply for easy review.
SUBJ LINE FORMAT : EDIT, COPY/PASTE to SUBJ LINE and update :
(I delete these instructions to myself before sending)
MWR : MON, NOV 09, 1885, 01:00pm, 60min [req/act] for SITE NAME
(I update this to get a subj line reflecting most of the details, so easy to review without even opening the email)
EVENT SPECS:
DATE:
TIME/DURATION:
LOCATION:community name
REQUEST: event/theme/vibe
PERFORMER ASSIGNED : Pending
BUDGET:Pending Approval
INVOICE : Pending
Below is a recent example of a request that I just replied to with my template, so you can see it in action.
SUBJ LINE : "[sr] MWR : WED, NOV 11, 2026, 12:00pm, 60min [Veteran's Day with John Van Beek] for [REDACTED]"
EVENT SPECS:
DATE: WED, NOV 11, 2026
TIME/DURATION: 12:00pm, 60min
LOCATION: [REDACTED] [dining room during lunch]
REQUEST: Veteran's Day Musical Program
PERFORMER ASSIGNED : John Van Beek [guitar/vocals]
BUDGET: $175 Pending Approval [$300 Event Rate, -$125 discount]
INVOICE : Pending
It might make sense to start adding WHO requested this. In fact, that's not a bad idea, given TURNOVER and also the sometimes poor internal comms between departments.
What tweaks might you suggest to this template?
I also keep a "What went wrong today?" log, and use that to regularly overcome common miscommunications where "oh, I thought you meant this, but now that you mention that you meant something else, I can see how to rephrase things to avoid confusion in the future."
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COMMS : Service Requests and more...
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