Dear Flight Attendants,
Your Negotiating Committee and the Master Executive Council (MEC) have been working with Hart Research Associates to resolve the challenges with the follow up AFA negotiations survey. Access to the online survey via individualized links Is being closed out. However, since there are many Flight Attendants who have yet to complete the survey, AFA and Hart Research Associates have coordinated to provide alternate access to the online survey.
Instructions will be sent In a separate email communication from AFA (not Hart Research Associates) shortly. The survey will remain open until Friday, May 9, 2014, at noon Eastern (0900 PDT). For security reasons, it is important that you do NOT post the instructions on social media.
What went wrong with the email invitations sent by Hart Research Associates? Very likely there is no single root cause. AFA reviewed the updated email addresses with our existing database and there were several discrepancies. In many instances the Flight Attendant provided the same address name but with a different email host (e.g. Gmail vs. Hotmail).
We also observed many issues resulting from certain email hosts rejecting the survey invitations altogether. This is called a “hard bounce.” More specifically, a hard bounce is when the email host filters out bulk emails by not even allowing them through the host’s filter. This results in email not even reaching an individual’s spam folder.
A hard bounce happens when an email host receives a number of emails around the same time from the same sender (FlightAttendantSurvey@hart-research.com in this case). AFA experienced similar issues with the last negotiations survey in 2011. Anecdotally, we can confirm AOL and Comcast appear to generate the largest number of hard bounces. Unfortunately there is nothing that can be done about hard bounces except to have Flight Attendants use another email host.
One of the other issues is that Hart Research Associates operates on Eastern Time Monday through Friday during normal business hours. It seemed many Flight Attendants who sent in troubleshooting inquiries outside of this window were getting frustrated when they were not receiving a response right away. Keep in mind that all survey invitations were being sent by Hart Research Associates directly and AFA had no way to expedite the process. We were simply passing along requests to Hart.
Combine all these reasons with the fact that your leadership was fully immersed in the annual AFA Board of Directors meeting during this time and it was a perfect recipe for frustration! Please be assured it is extremely important to AFA that your voice is heard. If you haven’t yet completed the survey, be looking for the instructions immediately following this communication.
Thank you very much for your patience!
In solidarity,
Your MEC–Jeffrey Peterson, Brian Palmer, Yvette Gesch, Becky Strachan, Laura Masserant, Cathy Gwynn and Sandra Morrow; and
Your Negotiating Committee–MEC President Jeffrey Peterson, Kristy Stratton, Lisa Pinkston, Jake Jones and Christina Frees
