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New Website and Mailing List

Mostly impromptu speech on the updates on the new website and mailing lists for Fair Oaks Toastmasters. I don’t have this one written and am writing something after the fact that I wanted to speak on.

The presentation is present here

In this speech I introduce the new emails, the new mailing list and the website for Fair Oaks Toastmasters.

This is a follow up from my speech from last week talking about the changes that we did in the mailing lists. I talk about why we did this. It is not that some engineer decided to redo the wheel without thinking. We all know engineers love that. But this was not done for the reason. I also talk about the new mailing list the new email addresses, new website and new everything. I will also mention the posting policy - the same old posting policy which we want to reinforce because it is so important. Lets start with the why. The club already had a website and a mailing list. I hope no body uses the phone I show in this slide. The world has moved from the dial phone to the iPhone. The old website did not even run on the iPhone. Now in the old system, if you have something you dial you had to rotate it full. Takes a lot of effort. Similar was the experience with our existing website. Updating it required multitude of forms, going to a variety of places that brought down the overall efficiency of the club.

Lets talk about the emails. There are official email addresses for all officers now. The doors of this room have been shut down and you will be forced into a sales presentation. All officers get their own photograph on the club home page. All of us have an excerpt by toastmasters, a link to your website for free SEO, free publicity as people of value. The officers work has greatly been reduced. You get a free archive of all your emails and as a bonus all new officers get an access to the email communication that took place before they joined the post. There is not a blank state to start any more. Just read through the communication that happened before you took over and you have most of the information you need.

Lets talk about the mailing lists. I sound like a google salesman but I am not. We had to chose a shoulder to stand upon as doing this work without the right tools is very time consuming. With google for non-profits, google actually picked us up upon its broad shoulders by providing the business suite for free. They say they don’t do any tracking (your wish whether you want to believe it) and even if they do the club is designed to be open and transparent and most of this information will lie int eh public domain anyways. Now we have four mailing lists. The membership list I have talked about in detail. All of us members have access to emails from this list. Only paid members can post here. The next are the contact and officers mailing list. We would love to have feedback for things that are and those that are not working. Anyone can post to the officers and the contact mailing list and even though we are a volunteer based organization we try to respond within 2-3 business days.

Adding users to the new system is extremely easy in comparison to what we had. It is no more and obscure set of dialog boxes in an obscure website. The system is a lot easier. Goto admin.google.com and you will see something similar to the screen on your left in the slide. Click on Groups and you get the screen similar to the one I showed last. There you can click on the add user button to add users and paste the email address. As a great tip, keeping the list in sync is actually extremely easy. Remove all from the mailing list. Goto toastmasters.org and download the club roster. Paste it in the dialog box. Click submit. Done. Hope to find the next year’s VP PR ready.

The new website is also extremely easy to edit. Not trying to be a google publicist, it is hosted on google sites which gives a click and drag way to create a website. Click and type on a section. Good enough sample layouts, a pre-built theme is ready for use. Adding images gives you layout options. There is built in support for youtube and google maps. The website is already up to date with the content on the previous system.

Now the most important part. Our posting policy is as simple and straightforward as it has always been. We provide free publicity to you and you own everything. We are happy to repost your content if you need it. Free SEO to your website and free branding to you. You already have a lot of speeches that you must be recording every meeting. We are happy to take icebreakers and speeches where the speaker freezes on the stage. An A Um on the stage is as useful as the eloquent expert as that shows that we are a variety club with speakers of every level. It also shows how much you have improved over the past year practicing the art of speaking. We are happy to take posts and spread them over the linkedin audience. We can have a better and much more professional reach that an individual - good like-minded people who would be happy to learn from you. So why wait - send us your content and see it all over. Thank you.

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