One step beyond - empowering the volunteers
While there’s another note on mail merge, there are some other tips we all need to use the modern word processor efficiently:
… and more tbd …
I’m posting this under “training,” but again, the correct choice of a tool may be key to how involved the “training” is. For instance, if a mailing list is used to exchange working documents, there need to be all kinds of protocols devised to say
On the other hand, with the proper choice of a tool/environment these problems go away — handled by the workflow embedded in the tool — or at least are raised up a level that don’t require such attention to the details of the process.
One tool just recommended on the NTEN discussion list is www.airset.com. Others are listed in the Groupware section of opensourcecms.com. If you’ve got recommendations or experience with any tools that would be appropriate for a geographically diverse group of AAUW members (e.g. a state or national committee) please do comment.
This is related to the post on mail merge, but is focused on how the local data respository is updated and maintained.
Obviously, if it’s easy to download and Excel or CSV file from the Association with the branch contact information, it should be straightforward to upload that into the local system used to keep track of members, run mailing labels for the local newsletter, print off phone lists for the telephone tree, etc., etc.
However, “straightforward” doesn’t mean “intuitively obvious” so this is, no doubt, a training opportunity.
On the other hand, having spent a considerable part of my life trying to train folks on “not the best” software, changing the underlying platform might make the training much simpler. What I’m thinking of is a “standard” branch database (maybe distributed in OpenOffice format) and corresponding web services application. I’m not enough a programmer to even do a prototype here, but wouldn’t it be great if there were a button on the local app that would make a query to the Association data store and get back the necessary updates? Maybe an XML app of some sort? The Association then could become the “one true source” of contact data — strongly encouraging all branch and personal updates to be done through them. We’re years away, I know, but could we start thinking about things in those terms?
Severity: minor
Audience: moderate
Fiscal effect: unknown
Policy question: no
Reported: no
Link: https://www.aauw.org/member_center/styleguide.cfm
Searching (with the Google search on www.aauw.org) for “style guide” gives a results page, the first of which is
https://www.aauw.org/member_center/styleguide.cfm
Note the “https”, not “http”.
That request just hangs — presumably because the https service is not available at www.aauw.org (most secure transactions are done through a different subdomain).
But until that’s noticed, and you change the URL to http://www.aauw.org/member_center/styleguide.cfm (which works fine), there’s a suspicion that www.aauw.org is “down”.
I’ve no idea how widespread this is, or why the https-based URI got indexed in the first place.
Original post:
I’m having intermittent problems getting to www.aauw.org this morning. This may be difficult to track, but I’m wondering if there is a periodic report on site downtime or other service level metrics for the site.
I hope Betty doesn’t mind, but I’m posting the copy of the group’s working rules as approved by the board at their November meeting:
They are, of course, a work in progress, but they are filed here as documentation of a snapshot of what we’re trying to do and how we’re trying to do it.
Okay, RSS and similar technologies will help with the information overload, but for the next couple of years we’ll probably still be struggling with how to make the best use of e-mail. Skills that may need to be taught include
There are many other tips and techniques in references such as The Elements of E-mail Style by Angell and Heslop and the whole issue of “safe computing” probably deserves its own post.
The beta of Internet Explorer 7 has been released, and it does include the “live bookmark” feature that’s available with the Mozilla Firefox browser. This is the simplest kind of “news aggregator” or “RSS reader” and will mean that more and more sites will provide RSS feeds.
But to really take advantage of RSS does involve some experimenting and learning what the options are. This has been discussed before, but I wanted to document it as a training need, too.
We were tangentially involved in a discussion between the public policy department and a couple of the states on whether or not it would make sense to “piggyback” state advocacy efforts on the Association’s Capwiz account (see the two minute activist).
The quote we got last fall would be $1500/year with a $2000 setup fee for each state — it would be somewhat less if more than 20 states signed up. This about matches the deal that LWV SC got - $2875 first year, $1875 thereafter.
It’s not clear how many states could afford that. If you’ve got other options, please post them here.
The EdEqChange memos are distributed in e-mail as Word documents (fairly large Word documents because of the graphic header on the first page), and are posted on www.aauw.org as PDFs. There are evidently some members who want the documents in “text” format. [I’m assuming that’s what really meant is HTML since the documents are now pretty long and would be difficult to read without some formatting.] A number of issues (from member training and the skills expected of member leaders, to document formatting and overall priorities) are being discussed.
See also discussion elsewhere of OpenOffice as an alternative to Word.
As you can imagine, keeping up with the dates that are important to different folks in AAUW is a challenge. A new online calendar is being developed, and we were asked to make comments in January.