by Jodie Miners
I like working with Not For Profit organisations, especially since they usually have old technology and outdated systems so there is so much that I can help your NFP with, that can revolutionise the way you work. The basis of most NFP data requirements is based around a CRM or Customer Relationship Management system.
Each NFP is different, but there are some common features that most NFPs need to have when looking at a CRM system: [Read more…]
by Jodie Miners
You want a form on your website, right? The form is to enable members of your community group to sign up to become a member or sign up for a newsletter. Most websites will allow you to embed a form into your website, however WordPress.com has some limitations on embedding codes and only allows code from a few sites to be embedded. One of those sites is Wufoo.
Wufoo is the master of online forms – if you want to create fantastic looking forms then go no further than wufoo, and you can create three forms for free. Wufoo handles the collection of data and has a great range of APIs to link to other web apps.
Mailchimp is the master of email marketing, plus they have fantastic tools for profile and list management that makes it the ideal choice for maintaining your members list for your community group. You can create a custom signup form with all the required details and Members can use the mailchimp forms to update their own details. Oh, and they enable you to do great looking emails to your members, and it’s all for free!
So, you can’t embed a Mailchimp form into your WordPress.com website, but you can put a link on your website to go to the Mailchimp form. You can embed a Wufoo form on your WordPress.com website, and set it up so that every time someone fills in the form, the details automatically get passed across to Mailchimp. This way you have a great looking form, embeded on your website, and the data gets stored in Mailchimp where you can use it for communicating with your members. Sounds great, doesn’t it.
Well, there is just one small catch, and unfortunately it’s a big enough issue for me to not recommend using embeded Wufoo forms on your WordPress.com website. Here’s the deal:
Mailchimp forms have this brilliant feature in-built into them. If someone has already registered and fills in their details again, it recognises that you already have that email address recorded and asks the user if they want to update their details instead. When using the Wufoo form on your website, this smart behaviour doesn’t happen. Therefore if I’m a member, have added my name, address and all my membership details into the Wufoo form, then come along and fill in the form again, this time with only my email address, Wufoo just updates mailchimp with the new details, and therefore deletes my address and membership details. (eg, it could do this if someone entered an incorrect email address and it happened to be the same as a subscriber in Mailchimp already, potentially deleting records you have stored in Mailchimp.
I checked with Wufoo support about this and they said there is no way around this, it’s how the Wufoo to Mailchim integration works. Wufoo’s response was:
Unfortunately, the Wufoo integration with Mailchimp only works in an ‘update’ function. This means that it will only update lists with either new addresses, or current addresses with the new information.
I understand this, and it is one of the limitations of working with APIs, but it’s a bit disappointing. Therefore I will recommend, if you want to put a form on your website to manage members details, then just link to the Mailchimp form from your site, and style the Mailchimp form to look nice, like your website does.
The Wufoo form integration works great for simple forms, like a newsletter signup that can be displayed in a widget on the sidebar.
by Jodie Miners
The second round of particpants for the Geeks in Residence program from the Australia Council for the Arts was recently announced, and I am very pleased to say that I am now the Resident Geek for the Arts Law Centre of Australia – well virtually in residence anyway.
The Geeks in Residence program is a great program by Arts Digital Era, part of the Australia Council for the Arts, that pairs up Geeks with Arts organisations that need a bit of a helping hand to find their way in the online world. Whilst it is mainly focused around getting help around social media, and online presence, some organisations also need some help in the back office systems, and that is where I can help. For some more information about the Geek in Residence program, have a look at the application process and FAQs page. The program also has it’s own website.
ArtsLaw provides a great service to all forms of artists from around the country to provide legal advice and legal services such as reviewing a contract, or downloading a standard agreement. This is a great service and very much needed in the art community.
After recently launching a great new website, ArtsLaw now need some help in streamlining some of the back-end systems to more integrate the website with the internal business processes, and that is where I am helping out.
The Geek in Residence program is technically meant to be just that – in residence, but as I had already made plans to move to Melbourne when I was interviewed for the program, we were able to juggle it a bit and I am still able to help ArtsLaw, virtually, using a few great online collaboration tools and the good old telephone. (There will be some face to face time required in the Sydney office as we start to do some of the implementation and training). This also fits in quite nicely with the new systems and tools we will be implementing at ArtsLaw as it’s all about building on the success of their new website and moving to a more online way of working.
A big thanks to Fee Plumley, the woman behind Arts Digital Era and the Geeks in Residence Programe, and I wish her well in her new adventure. Also a big thanks to the team at ArtsLaw, as I am really enjoying working with you and I can’t wait to get these new systems and tools in place.
by Jodie Miners
Updated
This is the fifth in a series of posts for Creating a Web Presence for your Community Group. In this post I will take a look at Event Management for your Community Group.
Community Groups exist for having events – whether they be committee meetings, fund raising or the gatherings that are the reason for the group. Community Groups also have members, and you need to keep in touch with the members, and invite them to the events.
This post will cover how to maintain membership lists, how to email members and people interested in your group, and software to help you run events. This post has been the hardest to do, as there are so many options and it is very hard to pick the best ones to recommend, and that are free, provide the level of features you need, and are not too difficult to use.
Where is your current membership list? it’s probably in an excel spreadsheet, on someone’s home PC, or worse still, hand written in an exercise book that gets handed to each new incoming secretary (and yes, that is a real scenario from a community group I belonged to).
Why do you need a membership list? It is probably part of the constitution of your group, and that probably says you need to keep the name, address and the date they joined, as minimum information. You probably also want to include Phone and Email details.
You can use a Google Docs spreadsheet via your Google Apps for Your Domain account to maintain a list and share it with other members of you committee, and you can even use a Google Form to collect information from your members.
But for full management of all aspects of your members you may want to go with a full CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. There are a few that have free plans such as BatchBook or Wild Apricot (specifically for membership management), and they could be enough for what you need. Wild Apricot is the only one free online management system I have found that enables members to update their own profiles, but I have not tried it yet to be able to recommend it fully. But see below about MailChimp.
You need to email members regularly, and unless you have under about 20 members it’s not a good idea to email your members using your email account. Often you can forget to BCC everyone, and you won’t comply with the Spam Act. This is where I recommend using MailChimp. It is a full email management system and it’s FREE for mailing lists of up to 1000 subscribers. You can import your contacts list from anywhere, and it will handle email bounces and unsubscribes for you. You can even put a link from your website to a sign up form to enable people to subscribe to your newsletter automatically.
The great thing about MailChimp is that the sign up form and lists can include most of the information that you need to keep about members, such as Name, Address, Phone Number, Date Joined etc (however, they can not update this information themselves). So the MailChimp list could be your full membership database. MailChimp also has a powerful groups feature that allows people to sign up to receive information about specific topics.
Update
I really don’t know how I missed this when I first wrote this post – but MailChimp does allow your members to update their own details via the Update Profile link included in each email. This is such a fantastic feature, that I would strongly recommend that you maintain your full membership list inside MailChimp and just let people update it as they wish. At any time you can export your current membership list into Excel or Google Docs to do something like print a list of names onto labels for nametags.
Basically, MailChimp is so good that I would not recommend any other app to do emails to your members or handle your membership lists.
When you run events, you may have large events that the general public can get or buy tickets to. There is a great range of web based apps for running and ticketing of events now. The original (and probably best) app is Eventbrite. The number of features of Eventbrite is quite amazing, including an iPhone app to check people in at the event. Eventbrite is free for free events, and it is simply the best way to organise, promote and manage free events. Unfortunately, for paid events it gets quite expensive. A cheaper option (that I have not tried) is TicketBud. They have a flat fee of US$19.99 to manage a paid event.
Of course, after your successful event, import the list of people who attended the event into your MailChimp subscribers list for emails of future events to those people (assuming you have told people that that’s what you will be doing with their email address when they give it to you).
by Jodie Miners
UPDATE: WordPress.com now supports Google Calendar Embeds! See my post and the announcement from WordPress.com
This is the fourth post in a series of posts about creating A Web Presence for your Community Group. By now you have a Domain, your website up and running with WordPress.com and have set up Google Apps for Your Domain and now have email for all your core team members.
The next thing most community groups need is a Calendar of Events. Most community groups exist because they have events run for the members or the general public, and you need to be able to promote your events via your website. Your Google Calendar is perfect for this. You can even create as many different Calendars as you want to your Google Calendar, for different parts of your Organisation (eg Committee, Meetings, Events, or a calendar for each different sub group of your organisation.
I have put off writing this post for so long because I was really hoping that WordPress.com would come to the party and allow embedding of Google Calendars. Unfortunately they have not. Here is a WordPress.org (hosted wordpress) site showing an embedded Google Calendar (created by my friend @adb). This is what you can NOT do on a free WordPress.com site. Unfortunately it is still the best way to show your Calendar of Events, and it is such a shame that WordPress.com will not allow this.
However, here are a few other options to overcome this limitation:
For right now, I would create a link to the Calendar, and wait a bit longer and hope that WordPress.com comes to their senses and allows Google Calendar embeds in future. UPDATE: Which thankfully they have now done.
When you do start to use Calendar Embeds, Google has a great new feature that helps you create the code to embed multiple calendars.
by Jodie Miners
This is the third in a series of posts for Creating a Web Presence for your Community Group. In this post I will take a look at Email for your Community Group. This is a bit of a long post and has a lot of technical details and involved steps, but the good news is that you only ever need to do it once!
Most community groups have a President, a Treasurer and various other committee positions. The main feature of community groups is that the people in these roles change regularly – at least once per year. If you are dealing with suppliers or members of the public, the email communications may get lost when things transfer from the outgoing President to the incoming President. You usually remember to transfer hard copy files, and even maybe soft copy documents, but what about the email history of the group, that is harder.
This is where I will suggest one option only – Google Apps for Your Domain – because it is great, it’s FREE and it works so well for community groups and small businesses (See my previous post on Google Aps for Your Domain for small business).
Here are the steps to getting up and running with GAFYD Email for your community group:
Note that it could take up to 48 hours for the verification to apply because it can take that long for the DNS servers to update.
You should now be able to send and receive email from your Google Apps account, with the initial account you set up.
The next step is then to create an email address for each member of your community group. Create generic email addresses such as president@yourdomain.com.au, treasurer@yourdomain.com.au and info@yourdomain.com.au. There is a step by step guide on how to create users in Google Apps. Assign each user a generic, easy to remember password for now.
It will be annoying for your users to keep checking their email from your community group domain, so now you want to forward your email to the individual’s own existing email address. They can do this themselves, or you can do it for them before you let them know about the account you have just created for them. Here’s how to do it:
You may also want to set up a group email called committee@yourdomain.com.au. That way, to email the whole committee, people just need to use the one email address. Follow these steps for setting up groups in your domain.
The URL of http://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com.au is a pretty long URL to remember and may not be so easy for your committee members. So in this step you will set up some sub domains for each of the Google Apps, apps (Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Docs etc). We have not delved into the other apps other than Mail – that will be covered in one of the next posts in the series.
The subdomain for mail will be http://mail.yourdomain.com.au
This is the steps to set up the sub domains.
CNAME mail ghs.google.com. CNAME docs ghs.google.com. CNAME sites ghs.google.com. CNAME calendar ghs.google.com. CNAME contacts ghs.google.com.
Now email your committee members and let them know the following:
I would suggest the following rules for using the president, treasurer etc emails. If they are replying to an email sent to president@yourdomaincom.au it is fine to come from their own email address (if you are particular about keeping a full audit trail of communications both ways, then ask them to cc or bcc the president email address in all replies). If they are sending an “official” email on behalf of the group then they should log into the mail account to send the email from there (eg an email out to all members).
Or, if they already use Gmail for their own personal mail, they can use this trick to send your group’s email right from within their own Gmail account and have it come from their yourdomain.com.au email address.
In the next post I will talk about options for managing your members, and communicating with your members.
by Jodie Miners
This is the second in a series of posts for Creating a Web Presence for your Community Group. In this post I will take a look at the Web Site itself.
Web Content
This content can be broken up into Static and Temporal content. The static content is the information about the club itself, the committee and location and contact details. This information doesn’t change that often and is updated only when it needs to be. The temporal content is the information that is applicable to a particular point in time only. This is news, details of events, minutes etc. If people want to look back at old content that is fine, but only the most recent and relevant content should be the most visible on the site. I will put Upcoming Events into another category because that is going to be a separate post.
One thing to be aware of is the privacy of the individuals in your group. Have a discussion in your group about what your web privacy policy will be and make it known to the group (via the minutes or some formal communication). Allow people to opt out if they don’t want their names, photos and details online. See the post on Email for some more ideas about how to preserve people’s privacy.
WordPress
This is where I’m going to delve right in and say use WordPress for your site – yes that WordPress – the one that does “blogs”. WordPress is NOT just for blogs, it can be used for almost any kind of web site – including a shopping site. Wordpress is a Web Content Management System – that just means that it is an easy to use web based system that allows for the content to be separated from the design. So when you need to write a news article, you just write the article, you don’t have to worry about how it looks on the page, because that is already handled for you. Other Web CMS’s are Joomla, Drupal and Squarespace (to name just a few of the thousands there are out there).
WordPress comes in two flavours – self hosted (WordPress.org) and hosted (WordPress.com). This post will mainly focus on WordPress.com as it is free, simple to us and suits 99% of the website needs for a community group. If you want to host your own WordPress install you will need a web hosting provider. There are thousands and thousands of them out there, but for a simple WordPress hosting service you should not have to pay more than about $150 per year. Self Hosted WordPress has many features that WordPress.com does not have, including the ability to extend your site by using PlugIns, control the look of the site exactly using themes and CSS and even use custom code to make it do almost anything you could imagine. I like this article that explains self hosted WordPress in a bit more detail. If you start with WorPress.com and want to move everything to a self hosted WordPress at a later date, then it is a simple process. So there is nothing stopping you from starting now with a WordPress.com site.
Setting up WordPress
WordPress.com is simple to set up – it takes just a few minutes and you have your basic site set up – for FREE. From there you need to choose a theme. WordPress.com at the time of writing has close to 100 themes to choose from, so you should be able to find one that suits your community group. (If you want more control over the look and feel then you can pay US$15 per year to be able to apply custom CSS to your site). My advice is to stick with a simple theme with a custom header (where you can put your logo), and maybe custom colours. (This is why I love the Vigilance theme that this site is based on). See more information about Themes from the WordPress.com support site, including the great video. You may need to play around with a few themes until you find the one that is right for your group. It may not be 100% perfect, but this is where you trade off perfection for cost – remember so far this site has cost you nothing but a few hours of your time.
The next thing you want to do is create some content. Your static content such as committee, about the group etc will be created with Pages. Your temporal content such as news, events and minutes will be created as Posts. Each Post will be given a Category (eg News), which will help you navigate to only the posts about news or events. As WordPress is orignally designed for blogs, by default he Posts page will be the first page that you see when you come to the site. You need to change this to be one of your static pages. You set the home page in the Reading Options settings.
The next thing you need to set up is the Widgets that display in the sidebars. (Sidebars can be on the left, right or bottom of the page, depending on the theme you have chosen). In the sidebar, I would suggest at least some navigation to the latest news stories, some information on how to contact your group a search box, and a links to any other web sites that your group has (eg you may have images on flickr or a twitter account or facebook page). In the Events post I will talk about how to put an events widget on your sidebar.
Map your Domain to your Site
Once you are happy with the overall site, it is time to link the site to the Domain and then publicise the fact that you have a web site now. To link the Domain to the web site follow the steps to Map an Existing Domain on the WordPress.com site. This costs US$10 per year. There are three steps to this process.
This process can be a bit fiddly and don’t expect it to take a few minutes. But once it is done, it never needs to be done again (except paying for it each year).
That’s it! A simple web presence online, with your domain name for a total cost so far of under $100 for the domain and the domain mapping.
See the next posts in the series for more things to do with your website such as events and applications and ongoing management of your site.
by Jodie Miners
This is the first in a series of posts for Creating a Web Presence for your Community Group. In this post I will take a look at Domains.
Your Domain is the web address for your group eg www.yourclub.com.au or www.yourclub.asn.au. (actually the domain is the bit without the www, but that is getting a bit technical).
(I’m going to focus on .com.au domains – .org.au or .asn.au are similar also. There are more and cheaper options for hosting a .com or .org domain but there is also lots of info out there about them – just go to somewhere like www.godaddy.com)
First Step – do you have a Domain? If not – get one! It is very important to have a web presence for your group that represents the name of your group. There are 30 accredited resellers in Australia that can sell .au domains. The site WhatsInAName.com.au lists all the providers by price. (The list of domain providers in Australia can be found here). However, price is not the only factor in choosing a domain provider.
Some technical details: Your choice of web hosting platform will also play a part in deciding which domain reseller to go with. If you require web hosting (see the next article on Web Sites for more info on that), it’s best to stick with the same company for domain hosting as it is easier for administration. If you don’t require web hosting, you may still need DNS hosting. The cheaper domain providers charge extra for DNS hosting or don’t include it at all, and it’s not really that obvious from looking at their websites. (There are free DNS providers such as OpenDNS or ZoneEdit).
This is where I would recommend not skimping and going for the cheapest option. You really want a Domain provider that is reliable, has great service and includes DNS Hosting. (For the record, I use TPP Internet, they are not the cheapest, but they do include DNS hosting. I have found their service to be excellent – they even phoned me to make sure I had paid for my domain name when it was due a few weeks ago).
Remember that registering a .au domain has rules associated with it – basically the domain name has to have something to do with the organisation you are registering. Eg you can’t registered MyClub.asn.au for a club called something entirely different. See the full rules here or there are more basic copies of the rules on the websites of all the domain providers. The site MyWebName.com.au also has some great resources and information.
You also need to decide how many domains to register. Do you want the .com and the .com.au? It’s completely up to you and would mainly be a problem if there were other names similar that might get confusing. To keep it simple, try to keep to one domain name.
If you already have a Domain then who owns it? When is it due to be registered? Do a Whois lookup on the domain. Go to MyWebName.com.au to do a Whois search on the domain. The Whois search will tell you the name and email address of the registered person. If that person has left your organisation you can at least try to email them to get the login details of your domain.
It also tells you who the domain registrar is and where the Nameservers point to – we will delve into Nameservers a bit later. If all else fails and you can’t contact the person who has registered the domain, then you can contact the domain registrar and ask them how you can take back control of the domain. (They may require a letter in writing on a letterhead from your organisation). But as the domain has been registered some time in the last two years, hopefully you will be able to get in touch with the person who did it.
Now you need to decide to keep the domain hosting with that company or transfer it to another company. Most domain companies will allow you to transfer your domains to them for free (as they want your ongoing business). If you have a few different domains it’s a good idea to transfer them all to the one company, and you can even have them synced so that they all expire on the same day.
All in all, the domain should not cost more than $140 for 2 years, and you can get it for a lot cheaper than that.
Keep a record of everything you have just found out – it will come in handy for later.
Update October 2011
Modified some broken links.
Note: $140 for 2 years is now ridiculously expensive for .com.au domains. One of the most expensive now is $99 for two years. Remember, the price stated on the website may not include DNS Hosting.
by Jodie Miners
This is a series of posts about how to build a web presence for your community group using free or very cheap online tools that are simple to use.
I received an email a few weeks ago from a member of a community group. They had somehow ended up with two domains and two websites. They found my post on WordPress.com for your Domain and decided to email me out of the blue to see if I could help. I’m glad I could, so I thought it would make a good post. Then this week my Mum is building a website for a community group she is involved in, so I convinced her to try it the way I’m suggesting in these posts, rather than the old fashioned way of uploading a bunch of static HTML files.
I’m focusing on Community groups, because I am a member of a number of community groups and I also look after the websites for a few. With community groups I am also including sporting teams and associations, religious groups, not for profit groups and just general community focused groups.
The trouble with community groups is that people in the group come and go, and whilst there may have been someone who set up a website way back when, they are long gone and have taken all the info with them. And the site was probably set up on Geocities or some other equally horrible, outdated platform, and it’s full of static text and never updated.
So it’s time to leap headlong into the 21st century and rebuild or create your online presence. Think of your web presence as you would any other equipment your group has – it should be fully documented and minuted and someone should be designated to be in control of it. Once you have it all under control, don’t loose it again by letting someone walk away from the group with all the information in their head.
This series of posts will focus on the following:
I welcome any feedback on triumphs or disasters that you have had with setting up an online presence for your community group.
by Jodie Miners
As I sit here watching the final of the Australian Open 2010, it’s a great opportunity to write about my day at the Tennis on Monday.
I was very fortunate to be a guest of IBM as part of their Insight10 project. Insight10 is a group of 10 people who IBM have gathered to help them understand what is happening in small to medium business, so they can become more relevant to these businesses. The 10 of us will be blogging a bit over on the IBM Business Insight blog(and twitter feed). The day at the tennis was a great opportunity for 5 of the 10 of us to get to know each other over a casual and relaxed day out.
I’m not a huge tennis fan and have only ever watched a few big matches on TV (if I had to choose I would probably watch a good cricket match or game of golf before watching tennis). I had never seen a game of tennis played live before.
The day started with (soft) drinks in the IBM corporate tent (well, have a look at the pics and see for yourself – it was an impressive tent), and then went for a tour around Melbourne Park and underneath Rod Laver Arena, (but not in the areas the players were in). We go to see the bunker where the team from IBM run the IT at the event. It was great to see them very relaxed and sitting back watching sport (grid iron, not tennis) – as everything was obviously well under control.
Over lunch we had a Q&A with John Fitzgerald which was great. My question to him was, “As someone who has never seen the tennis live, what should I look out for that you don’t pick up on the TV”. His answer was that I would be amazed at the power with which they hit the ball – and I sure was.
After lunch we had a special treat especially for us geeks… whilst everyone else went out to see the tennis match, we had the pleasure of grilling two of the team that look after the Australian Open websites. These guys have a great job travelling around the world going to each Grand Slam, the US Masters Golf and the Tony Awards, where this IBM software is used.
Then we headed out to watch the tennis. Wow! Fantastic seats – 3 back from the court and in the corner near the baseline – and in the shade the whole day! We had two great games to watch – Djokovic vs Verdasco and then Williams vs Stosur. The first game went for 4 hours so it was fantastic to watch. The 2nd game only lasted 1hr and 5 mins but it was still amazing watching the impressive Serena Williams at close range.
The Tennis finished at about 7.30pm so we had a very long and full day. There is a great tweet and pic from the day here… (and I actually wasn’t tweeting, I was trying to work out how to MMS from the Android, but that is another long story)
Some of the things I learned on the day:
So I had a great day at the tennis and would very much love to go again – especially with the great experience of the corporate tent and the tour and lunch.
We also did some video Q&A for IBM so it will be interesting to see what comes of that – I will post a link in the comments when that is up. Thank you so much to Andrew Bidese and the team from IBM for a great day.
UPDATE: The video is now live and can be found here…
