VijayPande wrote:This one was a tough call. After much donor concern on this issue, we did our own research into the matter which showed that bigadv was out of balance. However, we know that any sort of points change will be unpopular. This puts us in a very tough position. If we do nothing, we're ignoring the majority of donors (i.e. "Pande Group doesn't care.") and going against our own data, in favor of the high end FAH donors (and some have called FAH "elitist" because of this). If we make the change that's right based on our own numbers (i.e. the change we've just made), we get the bigadv donors naturally upset, which obviously is very bad too. No way to win here.
In these tough situations, the best thing to do from my point of view as Director of FAH is for us to make the call that's best for the project as a whole, take the hits from those who will be unhappy, and move on and try to do the best we can from here. I can't guarantee everything we do is right, but I can guarantee that we take donor input seriously, take the time to investigate major issues to donors, and aren't afraid to make unpopular decisions to do what's right.
PS One question was why not give more notice. Here, our numbers were showing such high PPD (in some cases 500,000), that this was making a huge disparity for donors points. I did not want to give this another week to get worse. Also, in cases where there are points changes, we do not generally give notice. Please note that we will continue to give notice if a project type will be discontinued.
I'm sure point value's of various Wu's, Bonus's etc will continue to be a constant "juggling act", but it is supposed to be "all about the science" over everything else,
so as the one in charge of the project, if you tell me that the whole Bigadv project and it's bonus points, and then the current
reduction in those same bonus points for parity with other projects is, was always, and will continue to be 100% about the science 100% of the time,
then I'll happily fold as much as I can for as long as I can, it's obvious that going into detail of the decisions made "behind the scenes" would only lead to extended
arguements on both sides instead of working on more important tasks,
Rightly or wrongly points are the only way we have of putting any sort of "science value" on what we do, and receiving a little reassurance that is is still a valid way
of having some sort of reference as to the value of each project will make the changes made recently much easier to just accept and move on.