Outreach Committee Report – Feb 3 2014

SHCC Outreach Committee

February 3, 2014 Committee Report

1. Moving the website to WordPress
a. Advantages
i. Photos
ii. Cleaner organization
iii. Easy to post, including from your iPhone or Android device

b. Needed
i. People to learn how to use WordPress.com to forklift old meeting minutes into the new website
ii. Photographer (Laurie Bray?)
iii. A website editor? Who decides which stories?
iv. Someone to coordinate with Transportation and Land Use Committees

Christopher did a demo of what could become the new sugar house community council website. The address, for the time being, is: https://sugarhousecouncil.wordpress.com/

Scott suggested that we should create a style guide on a web page on the site to explain how people should update the wordpress.com website.

Amy will go ahead and add the minutes from 1993 to 1996, and see what problems come up. Best to load them from oldest to newest so they show up in that order. Christopher said that they can be re-ordered by changing the post date, although that method is somewhat cumbersome.

Christopher said he would email Carole and Amy the link to set up a wordpress.com account (usually email address and password).

We decided that we wold like the committees to identify someone within their committees to provide content on the website.

We also decided that we would like to ask the Trustees to provide a head shot (or ask Laurie to do a night of photo shoots) for the new website. And Trustees would also provide a 50 word bio. For instance: what brought you to the council, what do you most want to accomplish? Etc.

Scott mentioned that we need to have both sugarhousecouncil.com and sugarhousecouncil.org come over (or at least have one point over to the other). Christopher needs to speak to

Amy asked that Christopher change the background to something less colorful.

Scott also suggested that we create content describing what issues the SHCC has addressed over the years and what kind of impact we’ve had.

2. Canvassing team – knock on doors with flyers

a. Partner with committees to generate appropriate information

b. Make it social – pairs knocking on doors in a particular neighborhood

c. What is the next big community decision we could use this for?

d. Hand out the business cards

Find a canvassing team. These are people who will go door to door with informational flyers or knocking on doors and having conversations. Christopher said he would like pairs that would do this together — perhaps three teams of two.

Carole said that this idea really excited her.

3. Sugar House Socials

a. Partner with area businesses to set up discount nights where everyone on the list-serv is invited

Amy suggested that Christopher talk to Michael G to ask him if he would be interested in helping to coordinate this effort.

4. Carole’s neighborhood website

The committee was unable to view the neighborhood website that Carole had mentioned, and Christopher said he would include it on the next meeting’s agenda. Carole said she would forward the URL to other members of the Outreach committee to look at.

5. Pick a night to meet every month – or designate folks on the committees who would find the stories to write

The committee decided that we would meet on the Monday after the other committees meet, every month.

Meeting dates would be:
-March 24, 2014
-April 28, 2014
-May 12 (the weekend before other committee meetings, because of Memorial Day weekend)
-June 23, 2014
-July 28, 2014
-August 25, 2014
-September 22, 2014
-October 27, 2014
-November 24, 2014
-December 22, 2014

6. Design needs – logo, etc. ? Yard sign.

Scott suggested that Holly Adams might be willing to do some design work for the Outreach Committee, because she was involved with the Sugar House walking map. Scott said he would ask her. Amy suggested that perhaps she could create a flyer template with the SHCC logo, etc. that we could re-use for different issues. Scott said he would do the yard sign, but Amy cautioned that we needed to figure out the web site address first, whether we would be using .org or .com. Amy also suggested identifying businesses that would allow us to set out a sign up sheet for us to add their email addresses to SHCC’s email distribution list.