Use your technology to increase your communication with your members and prospects and the public.

We all know e-mail now as way to communicate, However take it to another level than just messages to the membership. Look at your list and create various lists of e-mail addresses. One may be officers fro officer type messages, another members, another interested people in community that should know what you are doing, another of your youth service advisors so they know when you re doing projects or meetings their members could help on, etc. Send –mails to the groups as appropriate. Meeting notices to members, but projects and meetings that you may want others at include the non-members. You can do this in your e-mail program or thru setting up list servs in yahoogroups.com or other places. We do have a Georgia Kiwanis group list where members can join and share with others at gakiwanis.yahoogroups.com (several of our clubs and division are using yahoogroups also) It is a monitored group which means to join I must approve and the first message sent must be approved by me. This will keep spammers off. It really has no impact on you as you will just request to join and I will get message to approve, which I should do same day and unless your address looks suspicious I will automatically approve. Then when you send first message their will be a delay on it going to everyone until I approve it. I obviously know if it is Kiwanis stuff or spam and will (dis)approve accordingly and then rest of your messages go straight thru.

You can use those e-mail lists to send your bulletins (pdf or word formats are best). Also use your web site for posting this info. Put the bulletin there if you do one. For an example see the Swainsboro site I do (www.swainsborokiwanis.org). I use pdf format to post and e-mail bulletins as they will look same no matter screen resolution or printer. You can convert to pdf using Cute PDF at www.cutepdf .com for free or you can buy Acrobat Standard or Professional (what I use but not cheap) or other programs.

Storing pictures

As you start shooting digital pictures you will find you have lots and keeping organized is critical. I would discourage just saving all of them in a single folder (My Pictures or any other) but instead organize them by when and what they are. Do this by creating a subfolder for pictures of events, trips month of around house, etc nd then put in their. Make the folder name be the event and the date. For instance when I downloaded pictures from north mid winter training I put them in a subfolder (al my pictures are in a folder called pictures) called “GA Kiwanis mid-winter training north – 2-7-2009”. Now I can do a search in the folder by date, Georgia Kiwanis or training. I would discourage using periods in name (confuses Windows sometimes) and slashes cannot be used so notice my date was 2-7-2009. I have both the original in there (as came off camera) and the edited version (which I add –edited on name when saving). There are also programs to help keep organized but this way does not cost me. Then I copy one or more subfolders to a CD for backup and write on CD what the events were like I named subfolders.

In a future article I will discuss Windows 7, IE8 and trends in technology that will affect all of us.

Dwight