- Identify a group of interested individuals in the community and select one of you who will serve as the first volunteer coordinator who will moderate the postings submitted for the network.
- Contact Us to have an ACON Yahoo!Group set up for your region.
- Become familiarized with the ACON User Guide whose guidelines layout what is not appropriate for posting.
- Search the web for online and print directories of community organizations for a list of contacts who might participate in the network. Otherwise think of folks you know in the community or those new that you meet at events.
- Invite others who are representatives of other community organizations to join the group and begin posting announcements. (Be sure to orient them to the posting guidelines that will be in place.) You can do this with personal emails or by using the "invite" feature at the webpage of your Yahoo!Group. Though new members can subscribe themselves via email, it is preferable for them to join via your Yahoo!Group webpage so that they can configure their subscriptions for digest or web-only if needed. (If signups progress slowly, you may consider subscribing people through the add feature but clearly letting folks know how to configure their subscriptions for other email addresses, digest, or to unsubscribe).
- Moderate postings to try to maintain a balance between local and national news as well as a variety of contributors. Two local posts for every national post might be a good starting guideline.
- Moderating via the web allows moderators to clean up subject headers, message body, and etc. I like to keep things focused on one topic (vs. newsletters)...in the header and in the body. If you remember...clean up the footers too of advertisements and unneeded signatures. If things are too much work to cleanup...ask the contributor to repost...and that helps you out from needing to do so in the future. I also edit out content directed to organization members. Job postings should be forwarded on to ACON-Jobs, or help the contributor get registered at ACON-Jobs so that they can post there directly.
- Once a good initial mix of announcements is established, encourage others to publicize the group to others they know through personal and organizational mailing lists. Invite staff, board members, volunteers. From this point on, growth of the network is dependent on a “friends-tell-friends” approach rather than central dependence on the coordinator. You might designate others as moderators with invitation/subscription privileges to help you recruit/add new subscribers.
- If you get job postings, you can redirect them to acon-jobs@yahoogroups.com if you are registered. Otherwise, for folks who regularly send job postings, you may recommend that they register on their own and post there directly. Register at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/acon-jobs/join and you can turn off receiving emails of the job postings for your convenience. Remember it is national jobs board so subjects should include city along with job title.
- As for the responses from new subscriber questionnaires - coordinators look them over to address any immediate questions or needs. Otherwise, they can be filed securely for future reference.
- On occasion, coordinators will make mistakes. As long as it isn't too egregious, I go with the assumption that readers will understand that it'll happen. So I don't take up more email mailbox space with an apology.
- If you are facing an issue not addressed by this basic guide and would like to consult with other ACON coordinators about it, post to the ACON-Coordinators Yahoo!Group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/acon-coords.
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