New Club Website

[Matt Mireles]

Hi Folks,

I'd like to take a stab at revamping the Columbia Alumni Club of Northern California website and creating some simple online forms to formalize / make it easy for people to:

-apply to join this email list

-volunteer to offer space or sponsor an event

-request help from the community

-suggest events and speakers

Here's what I'd love to know from you...

What two new bits of functionality do you want to see in the Norcal alumni club website? 

Cheers!

-Matt

P.S. As part of this new rollout, I'd like to implement some modern web-based collaboration tools like Basecamp + Google Docs to centralize important information like login credentials and improve transparency around our planning process. Ping me if you have suggestions or ideas on this front as well!

—

Matt Mireles

Read my mind at mattmireles.com

[Stephen]

Are you proposing starting from scratch or augmenting what's there via the nation builder platform? What's your experience been like so far using our current site?

Sent from my iPhone.

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[Victoria Cheng]

Hi,

The "Join with Email" button doesn't work (tried it in all three browsers I have) so I can't sign up to be on the list that way, but the website looks good.

• I like Matt's idea on being able to crowdsource events and speakers and to volunteer to be a speaker.  How's that done today? 
• I also really like his idea on making it easy to volunteer time or resources.
• Being able to submit events that people are organizing perhaps unrelated to Columbia.  For example, if I happen to be hosting TechCrunch Disrupt, but will let Columbia alums in for free/discount because I have an affiliation, that would be cool.  And you guys can filter them to make sure it's not spam, but maybe have those listed in a different color or in a different section.  
• Does anyone even check this site?  Nothing is listed under "Member Hosted Events"?  Are these only posted on the website or are they also distributed in the email?  Nothing is really listed under jobs either.
• How do I engage with this community?
• Whole Group Contact: If I wanted to submit an email to be sent to the group, how do I do it?
• Alum / Subgroup Contact: Is there a way in which I can look for particular people to engage with?  For example, I have a startup that's a medical device and I'm looking for an expert in the field.  Is there a way for me to search for someone with that backgroud and reach out to them?  There was a neat app Bizzabo I used once at a conference where people's LinkedIn profiles / profiles in a group were available to search through and you could Chat them.  I thought that was cool.  People were able to connect with other people who were interested in talking about what they were interested in

Career Event Suggestion: I once did a fun drinks event, where we pre-matched people and then rotated them based on their interests so they could meet other people related to their field. Data optimized networking.

Casual Event Suggestion: Dinner with Lions - Tour of SF

I am a HUGE foodie and since I just moved to SF, I have a million different restaurants I'd love to try.  It would be super cool to post where I want to have dinner and 7 slots for people to sign up once a month.  I will probably do this anyways outside of Columbia if there's no interest here.  Actually, just opened an Eventbrite as I'm writing this email.  Might as well start now.  I'll send it around for if anyone's interested in joining for Dinner #1!  I'll have to come up with a pithy snazzy title, let me know if you have ideas.

Outdoor Event Question: It'll also be good to have some informal meet and greets over non-drinks (especially for those who don't drink or are getting older and can't stay up at night like me).  I saw you guys did a few last year like the BBQ and the Kayaking.  I LOVE outdoor events.  Maybe we can do some more of those?  Biking, rockclimbing, hiking?

Anyone going to the TechCrunch party later today?  I'll be there if anyone happens to attend.  Would be nice to put some faces to the names :)

VC

[Matt Mireles]

I have tried to use the current site, but never with success.

I suggest starting from scratch using an open, widely used & understood technology like Wordpress and switching to a mainstream provider like Mailchimp (or something like it) for email blasts. 

​The biggest advantage of Nation Builder as I understand it is that Columbia automatically pipes in alumni email addresses and contact info into the nation builder database.

​I am pretty sure I can figure out an automated method to export that Nation Builder data to Mailchimp, Google Sheets and/or some other email provider. 

​The beauty of wordpress is that it's open, tons of people know how to use & customize it, including technical and non-techincal people alike.

 

—

Matt Mireles

Read my mind at mattmireles.com

[Ryan MacCarrigan]

Victoria,

We're planning to launch a CVC dinner in July in lieu of a happy hour. Working out details now. Are you interested in running an experiment based on your proposal? We can limit the number of available RSVP spots and see if it creates a sense of urgency. Or, you can launch it as your own separate thing. Let me know! 

Best,

--

Ryan MacCarrigan

Mobile: 609-304-9802

Skype: ryan.maccarrigan

LinkedIn | Twitter

[Babak Soltanian]

from being involved with the club for years and also maintaining the original website (columbiaalum.com) for sometime, here is my two cents: 

Definitely having a better website with proper functions is a great idea and can help streamline many activities. However, the challenge has always been the resources to build a new site and then maintain it over time. 
Before nation builder, one of the board members proposed to build a new site on google platforms but he left the board before finishing it. 

-Babak

[Matt Mireles]

@babak: that's a great point!

This is why I'm hoping to implement the website using Wordpress--literally the most popular website software in the world. I want to create something that anyone can access, update and maintain.

If anyone has better suggestions re: how to achieve this goal of universal accessibility, I'd love to hear your suggestions and insights.  

—
Sent from my iPone you sing Siri.

[Stephen Wang]

I'm forwarding Chris Jones' email below - but it highlights some of the issues we've had in the past. Before we go off and scrap something that people have spent the last 2 years in the CAA working on - would like to really investigate if it's a website issue or a board (us) usage issue. I'm not in love with the nationbuilder site, but it actually does what we want it to do, we aren't using it. 

e.g. It should be pretty easy to use the platform to create an event submission. You just have to join the site. If you're having issues joining the site via email, we should figure out what that technical problem is. 

The biggest reason why we use this new platform is we've been fighting a battle for the last few years getting database access to the Columbia database that is updated quarterly with new grads, people who move, etc. There's no good way for us to get data like that, don't really want to argue with anyone about it, it's the truth.

Regarding Victoria's question about what's going on with the site:

- Nothing is listed under member hosted events because 1) nobody until a few days ago organized something outside of the board and told us 2) the events that are over aren't shown.

- the jobs page does have postings on it - it's not steadily refreshed.

Engaging with community--

- there are 10k people on the email list that columbia provides to us. we should talk about what you want to send to everyone, or if that's the group you do want to contact

- if you want to engage a subset - we need to figure out how to segment the data, that's something we need to figure out.

Anyways, my point to this is, and I know i'm coming off defensive, is that before we start trying to re-invent the wheel, let's figure out what the real problem is. Personally I don't think it's a technology problem, yet. I think it's us being dedicated and updating the website with event information and jobs information, etc. Right now, nobody is uploading to the website except for myself - that's not a technology issue, that's a people/organizational issue. Once we re-organize ourselves, we need a person dedicated to the web platform, whatever it is (and to head off the potential conversation later - I don't want to hire someone to do this - we don't have budget to do that - we just need our volunteer group to stick with it and do the work). 

I would like to organize what we want the site to do and we can take an honest assessment if the current site does that for us from a technology point of view. If it doesn't, let's talk about next steps with Jaclyn. I don't want to do another website redesign and run into the same problem because nobody took care of the site.

When we first switched to NationBuilder as a platform, I sent out a training and information for logging in and using it. I don't think anyone did the training. I'd be curious to see how many of us even signed up for an account. Let's give this an honest assessment before jumping the gun.

From: Christopher Jones <jones...@me.com>
Date: June 6, 2015 at 7:47:47 PM PDT
To: "cu-alumni-n...@googlegroups.com" <cu-alumni-n...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [alumni BoD] New Club Website

I created a website (www.columbiabac.org) for another CU alumni club that I'm involved with using Wordpress. We use mailchimp for our email blasts. 

Recently, the CAA has been pushing us towards switching to NB. We explored some of the ideas Matt is suggesting, but to make a long story short, The CAA would not allow us to "export" the CAA database to mailchimp or any external system for privacy reasons. People who sign up for NorCal communications at alumni.columbia.edu would have to actively opt-in and consent to receive communications from the NorCal club through mailchimp or another provider. When you consider the fact that there will be new subscribers through Mailchimp as well as requests to unsubscribe, and this info would have to be reported back to CAA, things get very complicated.

Supposedly, NationBuilder is supposed to allow club administrators to track various metrics of alumni enragement, e.g.membership dues paid, events attended, money donated, etc. through a single control panel. Admittedly, I haven't explored these features but if we were to switch to Wordpress we'd lose that functionality.

Perhaps we can discuss this at the next board meeting.

Best,

Chris 

[Matt Mireles]

@Chris: This is great info! Thanks man. 

Your point about information access is actually a non-issue. After reading your note earlier today, I successfully imported 12,000+ contacts from NationBuilder into Mailchimp. It was a manual process, but pretty simple and painless.

@Stephen: If the choice is between spending months & investing thousands in something new vs trying harder to make Nation Builder work, then I think you’d have a strong point. But it’s not. 

You can spin up a wordpress site and slap a modern looking theme on it in a few hours. In fact, I already started. And we didn't have to pay anyone! Check it out: ColumbiaNorCal.com 

Literally 19% of all websites are built with Wordpress. That means that if I leave the club, it is extremely likely that my replacement will have experience with the tool. But the issue is not simply Wordpress––it’s about switching to a modern toolset of our own choosing. 

The problem is not NB’s technical capabilities, the problem is Nation Builder’s practical usability––for organizers and participants alike. 

Here are the tools I recommend we adopt in lieu of Nation Builder:

Website: Wordpress 

Wordpress is quite literally the most popular website platform in the world. It’s awesome because of how customizable it is due to the robust ecosystem of third-party themes (visual design) and plugins (actual functionality). Because Wordpress is so popular, it’s easy to find tools and people who play nice with it. 

Email: Mailchimp 

Mailchimp is a popular email marketing platform. It’s awesome because it’s easy to use and ubiquitous, which means it plays nicely with Wordpress and every other platform under the sun.

Here’s what I propose:

Rather than spend months debating whether we want these tools, let’s just try them out and treat it as an experiment. If the tools don’t work as advertised or people don’t use them, then we fall back to Nation Builder. 

How does that sound? Any objections?

Cheers!

-Matt

—
Sent from my iPone you sing Siri.

[Stephen Wang]

I do object.

I haven't seen an argument that nation builder is difficult to use and doesn't do what we need it to do. Further more, nation builder is free and Columbia dynamically keeps its email list up to date. We could build a new site and do an import every quarter but is that really the issue?

My problem right now is I think the problem is participation. Case in point, nation builder has 2 admins, me and Jaclyn. I know you guys haven't given it a chance because you haven't used it -nobody has asked me to be an admin. Nobody.

Even if word press is the right solution, I'm not convinced yet that someone is going to be there to update it. Matt are you going to update it? I'm just saying, let's be honest about our problems and what to fix before we try to throw a technical solution to a problem that doesn't necessarily exist.

Let's make a commitment as a board to be diligent about managing it. This can't be a get excited about things for a week and abandon it by the roadside kind of thing. Not willing to throw everyone's time and money behind something until we know what the real problem to fix is.

[Matt Mireles]

Then how about this: Let’s treat the email list and the website as separate issues. 

We still use Nation Builder for email. 

Because really, my main issue right now is with the website, which I think is ugly and outdated and not useful for members.

Then… I will setup a modern Wordpress site and distribute accounts to yourself and any other member of the board who wants one. And I will own it. I will keep it updated and make it pretty. And I will invite others to collaborate on it with me. And I will teach people who need teaching how to use it. 

I will eat the first 3 months of cost of the website. After that, we can vote to keep using it and pay for it with club funds, or simply revert to the Nation Builder site. 

How does that sound? 

—
Sent from my iPone you sing Siri.

[Stephen Wang]

Are we talking about the same website? http://norcal.alumni.columbia.edu/ - I still don't think we've answered the question about deficiencies but..
If you commit to managing it - have at it with the redesign.

[Matt Mireles]

When I google Columbia alumni club Northern California, this is the result:

http://columbiaalum.com/

—

Matt Mireles

Read my mind at mattmireles.com

[Stephen Wang]

Getting rid of the site is easy of search engines. We've had this new site for months now maybe even a year. It's in our newsletter and on plenty of board emails, nobody on our board should be saying they haven't seen it or used it.

[Nadine Rose]

I think as we move forward on this we should keep the following in mind:

1. Confirm with CAA (Jaclyn) - realistically we need their okay on this so we can keep getting new contacts. @Jaclyn what are your thoughts? 

2. Present a template of this plan including price points  - @Matt you've made a great start, can you include the cost for implementation + maintenance? 

3. Propose a "Community Manager" role for the by-laws that someone would have to fill. It would have specific expectations that if not fulfilled, would result in that person being removed from the board. This would address some of the underlying issues Stephen brought up like retention and continuity. I am happy to write up this role based on the current template of positions and present at the meeting on June 21st. 

As for training on NB - Stephen can we add a quick walk through of the system to the agenda for the meeting? I think it would be helpful for the board to see how it works and impacts the chapter. 

See y'all soon!

Nadine

--------------------

Nadine Rose | 415.475.9509

www.linkedin.com/in/nadinerose

[Stephen Wang]

+ Jaclyn to weigh in

Hi Jaclyn,

We’re discussing within our board the possibility of building another Columbia NorCal website that is maintained by our club. This would be built on something like WordPress and not Nation Builder. Proposal would be manage email through NB and manage web presence through a new site. What’s the CAA position on this? Thanks!

Good suggestions Nadine —definitely agree on the community manager role as being key.

Nation Builder Online Materials - i’ll plan to walk through it during the next meeting as well.

You can review the webinars from both Phase I and Phase II online - visit our training archives to access: http://columbia1.nationbuilder.com/training_archives.

Remember:  Before activating your website and going "live", certain steps must be completed to ensure accurate and proper information is on your website:

1. Review the Phase I checklist to make sure your website has been customized for your organization: http://columbia1.nationbuilder.com/checklists.

2. Everyone with admin permission in NationBuilder must sign the Terms of Use before actively using the tools.  If you have not signed these, please do so immediately to prevent a change to your permissions: http://columbiaalumni.co1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_eqXmIQnLCAZYR3D.

[Nadine Rose]

Hi all -

Jaclyn - thanks for these thoughts. 

Stephen - thank you for the training- this was more than enough to know how the site works and what it can do. If folks check it out, I don't think an overview is really needed during the meeting. 

Looking at it in more detail - maybe we don't have to set aside Nation Builder - but can instead use the tools on the dashboard to make the website more "pretty" and easy to use. There is also the option to add our own apps and code. This isn't my expertise so maybe someone else with more insight can add some thoughts?  @Chris?

I'll have a community manager description in time for the meeting. 

@Matt - any thoughts on these updates? 

Best,
Nadine

--------------------

Nadine Rose | 415.475.9509

www.linkedin.com/in/nadinerose

On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 1:48 PM, Jaclyn Chu <jac...@columbia.edu> wrote:

Hi All

Thanks for the suggestions, Nadine. Here are my comments in red. Let me know what you guys think.

1. Confirm with CAA (Jaclyn) - realistically we need their okay on this so we can keep getting new contacts. @Jaclyn what are your thoughts? 

If the club decides to move off NB, you will not be able to get our data. So, this means the club will have to start from zero or use the very last version of your local list. NB has filtering, affiliations, metrics, industry, directory, and a lot of other great features. I can't guarantee that CAA will help support and supplement additional email marketing, since clubs can manage their own websites and lists via NB.  I think it would be a huge loss to the club if you move off of NB. If you move off of NB, everything comes with it. 

Stephen has been the only admin working on the club's site since Sept 2013 when NorCal first onboarded and has been doing a great job as a one man team for 1.5 years, among 10+ board members. No other active board members offered to help him and/or at least followed through. I pitch in when I can because Stephen could use some back up. The metrics for NorCal are pretty good compared to other clubs. 

Examples of robust websites:

boston.alumni.columbia.edu

atlanta.alumni.columbia.edu

houston.alumni.columbia.edu

2. Present a template of this plan including price points  - @Mattyou've made a great start, can you include the cost for implementation + maintenance? Your call

3. Propose a "Community Manager" role for the by-laws that someone would have to fill. It would have specific expectations that if not fulfilled, would result in that person being removed from the board. This would address some of the underlying issues Stephen brought up like retention and continuity. I am happy to write up this role based on the current template of positions and present at the meeting on June 21st. 

I like this idea and would be great if you can draft something. As the bylaws need to be revised, term limits need to be put in place and, like you mentioned, removing inactive members board members, as well as removing active board members who do not follow through with responsibilities. NorCal has so much potential and I think it can be one of the strongest clubs, if not the strongest, among the domestic CAA clubs. 

Attached are the current bylaws that need revisions. My hope for the meeting on 6/21 is to think through board structure and committees based on interests and geography, so we can start to think through programming and events. 

As for training on NB - Stephen can we add a quick walk through of the system to the agenda for the meeting? I think it would be helpful for the board to see how it works and impacts the chapter. - I don't think there's time for this during the 6/21 meeting, but I am more than happy to do a walk through with those interested at any point. I'm still looking for a venue and not sure if there will be wifi. There's also the option of doing a GoTo meeting. 

Jaclyn Chu  '02CC
Director, Regional Clubs and Alumni Relations 
Office of Alumni and Development
Columbia University
Columbia Alumni Center
622 West 113th Street
New York, NY 10025
Direct: 212.851.7839
www.alumni.columbia.edu

Check out the CAA Arts Access website

[Matt Mireles]

Hi Stephen et al,

You’re right. We should not turn off norcal.alumni.columbia.edu as it is free and it integrates with the mothership’s internal database. And it ain’t bad looking. All of which are good things that we don’t want to lose.

That said, the website has some shortcomings. For example, when I Google "columbia alumni san francisco” (and similar search queries), norcal.alumni.columbia.edu does not even appear on the front page of the search results. Even when it does, it’s not the #1 result.

That’s a big problem. 

I think that a new community website can be additive and extend our community building efforts in new directions beyond the norcal.alumni.columbia.edu site without needing to replace it. 

If the goal of the existing site is to foster one-way communication from the board to the Alumni community, then the goal of new site will be to:

a) connect members of the community to each other, and 

b) foster two-way communication between the community and the board. 

I will happily manage / update this new community website myself and share administrative access with the board. For the time being, I will host the site on servers that I pay for. 

Sound good?

Cheers!

-Matt

 

—
Sent from my iPone you sing Siri.

[Stephen Wang]

Hi Matt,

Would like to discuss with our team and with Jaclyn in a few days when she is here. This is not just a website that's in play, it's our information aggregation and updates to that information. 

1. A couple things - SEO is something that's pretty easily fixed. It's just keywords that we can adjust as engines crawl the pages. The previous website - i've asked the previous president Allan, to ask the domain hosting company to end that site's existence. Problem solved. #1 on google once they do it and search engines re-crawl.

2. We should discuss if that functionality exists within the current site with Jaclyn and discuss how you would do it on a wordpress site. Would like to hear a proposal on how to address those issues you raised, maybe the answer is having a side site that has those abilities that the NB page links to or embeds within its page.

_Stephen

[Nadine Rose]

Found this really cool article on nation builder's website about integration and building out tools to update the look #swag. 

As we're thinking about changes we might want to make to the website, this is a resource we can use :)

--------------------

Nadine Rose | 415.475.9509

www.linkedin.com/in/nadinerose