Temporary Pause on Reviews and Delegation Idea Discussion

Fellow Bereans,

In a comment to my previous post, Nate posted the following:

“Be like Moses?

1. Delegate.

Find someone you trust, to share the load, and whom will respond faithfully to your requests. You still retain control, the content is still yours, but you’re using a scribe instead of a keyboard.

You are Senior Reviewer.

They are Personal Assistant, Scribe, Editor, Technical Click Clacker. Community outsource. Could have multiple.

Voice recordings. NDA. You can decide if they are paid or unpaid. It’s essentially a data entry role to take your instructions and put them into action in exact ways. Time consuming but critical to your operations.

Have a system that you can add to backlog Reviews (dedicated SSD), what’s completed, who did, paid?, be super organised on the management side, and God will bring the right people to you.

This is scalable. Mobile. Global.”

As this comment continues to gain traction, I’ve been thinking and praying about what this will look like.  I currently have a guest review process that nobody has taken me up on.  Maybe folks are unaware of it?  Maybe I’ve made it too difficult?  I honestly don’t know, but it’s clear that folks want to help out and that they aren’t using it as-is.

Rather than continue to complete reviews in frustration, I’ve decided to put time and effort into creating a sensible guest review process.  Therefore, I am suspending reviews until further notice.  However, polling will go out as usual next week.

I’d like to propose the following changes for the guest review process and open the floor for discussion:

1. Move the entire guest review page to a post that will allow comments.  It’s currently designated as a “page” that won’t allow them.  The new post will potentially contain the following information:

Thank you for your interest in submitting a guest review!

I need your help to review songs that are scheduled, “extra songs”, new submissions, and additional songs that did not pass polling.

Potential reviewers can sign up by using the Contact Me form with an email address that you check and the name of the artist and song you would like to review.  Ensure that you put “Guest Review” in the subject.  I will respond to you via email.  However, if your email address bounces back, I will post a temporary comment on this page to communicate with you anonymously, that your email address didn’t work and will ask you to send it to me again.  Thus, if you don’t hear from me, check this page for comments.

You may also sign up to review a song not on any list, provided that you are not self-reviewing your own song and that the song does not contain excessive foul language, does not glorify drugs, sex, rape, abuse, murder, or any other heinous crime, or contains lyrics in a language other than English.  If you sign up for a Christmas song review, let me know ahead of time so that I can schedule it for December.

If you are accepted, you will not be compensated for your work, must agree to affirm the Statement of Faith at the bottom of this post, and must properly cite outside sources.  If you wish to copy + paste commentary from one of my reviews, feel free to do that without crediting me.  I’m more interested in getting reviews out than receiving credit this way.

Reviews should follow my evaluation criteria using the Guest Review Template, which excludes commentary about the artist on their theology.  Reviews should focus solely on the merits of the song.

Feel free to download and use Bible Verses by Topic to copy + paste Scripture into your review.  I developed this document to save me time when similar topics appear in different songs.  If you want to add additional Scripture to a topic on your review, let me know so that I can research it.  This website uses code from Faithlife Reftagger that will automatically convert Scripture to NASB links, meaning that you don’t need to spend time linking each Scripture individually.

If you signed up for a scheduled song, ensure that you submit your review four days before the scheduled date.  For example, if the song is to be released on February 23rd, then you should submit your song by the end of February 19th, even if it’s only partially done.  This will give me time to write the review myself or examine the review before it goes live.

You will be allowed to write a small blurb about yourself and include links to your ministry/business website, social media, or other URL.  Although I will not compensate you, writing reviews could potentially lead to more business opportunities or a chance to get your ministry seen by a larger audience.

Finally, you may submit as many guest reviews as you want.  However, if more than one person requests to review a song, I will select the person who requested it first.

3. I’ll publish the entire offline list of songs that did not pass polling on the Upcoming Reviews page.

4. Rather than signing a document, submitters will respond via email that:

1. • This review is my original work with proper citations.
   • I understand that I will not receive monetary compensation for my review submission and that I can self-promote at the end of my review.
   • I understand that Vince Wright reserves the right to approve, reject, edit, or delete guest reviews at his discretion. He will communicate changes with me using the email address I provided.

This part only needs to be done once per person.

What do you think?

Related reviews:

Discussion – Democracy Polling Idea