First returns arriving

Great excitement here at Thatcham Vision HQ as the first paper returns arrive. People have been completing the online version of the Thatcham Questionnaire since we launched it on Tuesday. We'll be using our 'wiki' - see the feedback page on our main site - to let you know what people are saying, but we won't publish details until after the closing date for completion of the questionnnaire - 2nd May.

In the meantime the wiki contains summaries of the views of over 600 people in Thatcham who have completed our earlier 'qualititative' surveys. These were mostly open-ended forms in which we asked people what they'd like to change about Thatcham and what they like best at present.

If you haven't completed the online questionnnaire yet click here to go the survey page and do so - it should only take you 5-10 minutes to complete it.

People are making good use of the text box at the end of the questionnaire to cover points and ideas which aren't in the questionnaire and comments on the survey itself.

Wrap Day

After a few hectic weeks our 'wrap' is published today. It's called a wrap, in newspaper jargon, because it's wrapped around The Advertiser free newspaper. Forty thousand copies of the wrap were printed yesterday and copies will be distributed to all homes in West Berkshire. There are two reasons for such a wide distribution. Firstly, we're interested in the views of people who live outside Thatcham as well as residents. So, if you visit the town, work there or go to school there we'd very much like to hear from you. Secondly it's not possible to target a wrap on specific areas - it must be printed with all copies of the newspaper, but even so it is very cost effective. If we wanted to produce, print and circulate a document of similar length just to homes in Thatcham and nearby villages it would be much more expensive than using the wrap format for our supplement and we wouldn't, for example, get coverage in places like Newbury.

We've had a very interesting time working with the team from the Newbury Weekly News on the wrap - notably John Hampson and Marcus Bishop - who have done an excellent job for us. (I'm sure that they'd want me to stress that all the words and ideas in the supplement are ours, not theirs.)

We're hoping to get a good response to our questionnaire and, just as importantly, to find more people who want to get involved in improving Thatcham. We've got an excellent team of volunteers working on the Thatcham Vision already (see page 2 of the wrap for details), but there's lots to do.