The board is trying again to push dropping the degree requirement. My fondest hope is that they’ll understand the importance of an actual GOTV and persuasion campaign before the polls open next spring.
For the initial rollout, they used a Kim Churches webinar — check this out starting at about minute 30 (though the initial 30 mins have good info, too).
AAUW is more than two years into the new regime. Better financial controls, clearer focus for the disparate departments, some long-time friends are gone, new folks seem to be picking up the pieces. The future of branches is still unclear.
I’m posting here after the new website was launched?but while the new CRM is still under development.
It looks as if 2020-2021 will my year to take a break from all AAUW positions. (I expect to be very busy with other things between July 1 and November.) I’m posting here because I just realized it’s been 19 years since my first rant about AAUW IT. That work at the 2001 Convention was followed by membership in the Technology Usability Advisory Group, chaired by AAUW board member Betty Bayless (may she rest in peace) to provide member input during the initial roll out of the MPP/MSD.
While the degree requirement for membership has been a major issue for me since 2005, the IT infrastructure can still grab my attention.
So, as I walk away until 2021, we’ll see where we land if/when I come back.
Whenever I’m in a virtual group of more than a few people, I encourage the use of a Google Group (groups.google.com) to keep the list of addresses “in the cloud” instead of in everyone’s individual address books. If the group uses Google Apps, they can also create a “group” there — it just explodes one address, like info@my.org, to multiple addresses (which can be easily edited when personnel change). Other mail systems from web providers (e.g. Dreamhost) have a similar functionality. The problem any of these things solve is that
When a person joins or leaves the list, the list of addresses needs to be updated in only one place. [And, of course, it means that *someone* needs to remember to update the list.]
But sometimes that just doesn’t work — either because I don’t have the energy to convince the powers that be to do it that way or … So there are times when I need to set up a “group” of my own in Gmail. This used to be pretty straightforward – go to Contacts, Select Groups, Create a group and add addresses to it (like you would with the Google Groups or Google Apps Groups).
Google, in their infinite wisdom, has, however, changed things so that Gmail “groups” are now “labels”. You can go to Gmail > Contacts > Labels to see who is in a group and delete the members. But to add people to a group you need to find their address on a list in your contacts, select their address, then hit the little label icon in the upper right and select the correct group name.
It works, just weird. But I got used to labels rather than folders for messages and now find it *extremely* useful to be able to add multiple labels to a specific message (to the point where Mailchimp’s “a campaign can be moved to a folder, but only one folder” seems horribly old fashioned).
Just posting to solidify what I learned.
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/30970?hl=en
Grumble.
Okay, I guess I understand that the new model bylaws are an improvement. But I must say that asking branches/states to update their bylaws twice in a calendar year reminds me of a company I worked for where the CFO would ask all the managers to redo their budgets whenever cash flow got tight — if they were fiddling with spreadsheets, they wouldn’t be spending real money.
Some great WordPress tips and an interesting way to make short training videos …