This morning, PRO held a conference call in response to Monday’s post about Sinead’s blog entry. The meeting was held at 8:30am. Here is the email from yesterday afternoon announcing the conference call from Samantha Lendl sent to all members of PRO:
“We would like to hold a early morning conference call regarding an action plan for communication in regards to the recent EN uproar. West coasters please feel free to email ideas or call me at a more convenient time. We hope you can make it and if not please email your thoughts on how we can improve our communication to the public concerning what PRO stands for and what we are trying to do…”
From what I have heard, the meeting focused on streamlining PRO publicity by sticking to a positive message and trying to get the world out about positive PRO initiative such as the training level grant.
My first reaction is to be amazed that PRO seems to be surprised or caught off guard by the reaction from the public. Frankly, I was pleasantly surprised that 55% of people thought that PRO was good for eventing and many of the 73 comments to the post were positive about PRO.
The other point I want to make is that anyone who reads EN knows that we are not anti-PRO. Our readers are a vast majority of the eventers in North America and a good portion of the worldwide eventing community, and their comments on Will’s post reflect public opinion. We don’t always give PRO quite as much attention as they might want, but we always try to be fair and we give PRO more positive attention than negative–we were one of the first to write about the PRO training level scholarship, for ecample.
Indeed, the “EN uproar” started with very positive comments by Will Faudree about PRO in Samantha’s interview on Friday, and then a response by Sinead to some critical comments on that post. Many of the PRO riders are good friends of mine and all are acquaintances, and they all know that we support the cause of riders who try to make a living by eventing here on EN, whether that is through PRO, the PHC, or elsewhere.
As we have always said, PRO has some good ideas and the potential to be a really strong influence on eventing, but for now lots of people are not buying in. Whether that changes or not depends on how PRO is able to influence public opinion and whether changes to be more egalitarian are seen as genuine steps or publicity efforts.
