I’m fully in support of any events like these so if there are any local pipers in the Reading area who would like to attend please let me know and I’ll put you in touch with James. I’m sure if you twist his arm you could squeeze a beer out of him too!

Hi Jamie,

I’d be really grateful if you could ask the rest of the WP Pipers if they are available for a really fun performance tomorrow evening (Wed 27th Jan)

Reading University Pipe Band and Reading University Students Union are holding the Reading Big Burns in Reading University and we would really like loads of Pipers & Drummers to come along and promote Scottish culture throughout the University. It was great fun last year and it promises to be even better this time round!

While RUPB can’t afford to pay financially, we will ensure that everyone is fed & watered plus it is a really good fun time and certainly does a lot to promote our Scottish passions

It will be held in The University of Reading from about 8pm – 11pm and if anyone has any questions I would be more than happy for them to call me!

Thanks Jamie, that’s fantastic!

If anyone has any similar events they want promoting feel free to send me an email and I’ll get them added to the site for you!

After I brought up the idea of a new membership based system for the site instead of the current open quote system it received a lot of positive feedback and encouragement. With this is mind I have decided to switch to this system as of today.

Membership Options:

* £25 – Directory Listing
* £50 – Phone Number
* £75 – Home & Mobile Phone Numbers
* £50 – Website Listed
* £50 – Email Listed
* £100 – All of the above (best value!)

This is an annual fee and is non-refundable.

How will it work?

The current link on the menu to ‘List of Pipers’ will be turned into a directory listing which will contain your name and website if you select either the £25 or £100 option. The only difference between these is the £25 option doesn’t allow you to quote on jobs.

The other membership options will go with your profile information on the site so the client can contact you directly.

As jobs come in to the site they will be emailed out to membership pipers and they can then reply to the blog post in a fashion similar to this:

I would be a good choice for your wedding as I live close by. I would perform the following duties at your wedding….If you’d like to contact me please see my profile here: *profile link*.

To be deemed as a ‘membership piper’ you will have selected one of the profile options such as phone number listing, email listing etc. Only membership pipers will be allowed to quote on jobs.

How can I pay?

Contact me via email for payment methods and further details.

After the switch to the private forum quotes system it seemed to cause a lot of confusion and more problems than anything else. Many people had problems logging in and forgetting passwords etc and it just didn’t seem to work. So for now at least I won’t be using the private forum for posting jobs. You can just reply to the blog post with a comment as before. The general forums will remain open and in use for discussion of all things bagpipe related.

Proposed Solutions:

* Keep the existing system of posting quotes as comments
* Introduce a new membership system

The new membership system would consist of an annual fee to have your contact information listed on your profile. So what would happen is I would make a blog post as usual and then you would leave a comment but exclude the quote e.g. I could do this job and would perform the following duties x,y,z. See my profile and get in touch if you’d like to book.

Expected Cost of Membership:

£50 – Phone Number
£75 – Home & Mobile Numbers
£50 – Website Listed
£100 – Home/Mobile Numbers & Website Listed

This would be an annual fee and would allow you to talk to the client directly over the phone without revealing your price to anyone else.

This is only a proposed solution at the moment so all comments are welcome and encouraged as I am trying to make this site as easy to use and as efficient as possible.

How does this help me?

Less emails

- I typically get around 50 – 100 emails per day for this site alone which is very time consuming as you can imagine and stops me working on promoting and improving the site to get you guys more jobs.

More efficient

- As the site grows it will naturally attract more clients and it takes time between when a client emails me to when I contact pipers and they contact me back. If all the communication was done on the blog post this would make everyone aware what was happening and things would happen much faster resulting in more jobs.

If there end up being regions where no pipers have signed up to this new proposed membership system then the old system of quotes would be used.

What do you think of this idea? Can you think of a better idea? Any comments?