A quick update about the weekly newsletter that Daniel and I are planning on sending out to all hosting clients. It’ll be a way for us to not only send out weekly summaries of what’s going on in the community but if there’s ever a situation like the earlier Wordpress exploit we’ll be able to quickly contact all clients and advisers.
Here’s what we’re thinking:
- Keep it short and simple – probably just a simple text email of about 200-250 words.
- Summarize what’s going on in the Forum, on the wiki, posts from the blog.
- Welcome new clients. Introduce new clients to the rest of the community. Might give people new ideas of what to do with their own sites.
- Encourage clients to spread the word about CoPress. I still think that word of mouth is our best way to advertise and who better to do that than the schools we’re already helping.
That’s it for now. If you have ideas about other things we should be including in this we’d love to hear them.
In just over twenty minutes, we covered a lot of ground at this week’s conference call, which was attended by Daniel, Adam, Greg, Andrew, Vanessa and myself.
High priority: Conferences, managed hosting and Connection Engine
We’re just five days away from the ONA 2009 Conference and about a month away from the ACP/CMA Conference. After some difficulty getting his hands on the right typeface, Adam is now putting the finishing touches on business cards to be printed tomorrow so we can give them out at these conferences. After evaluating the budget, we’ll be able to determine if we can buy rack cards, stickers, t-shirts and maybe pins too (yeah, we’re getting fancy).
In other news, plugins on the managed hosting servers are updating more efficiently after LiquidWeb did minor server configuration. For updates like this, we’re considering starting a newsletter to send out to clients about changes, tips and tricks and to introduce new members to the network. We want to ditch Google groups, but are unsure about what alternate option would work best besides a mass e-mail. Continue reading ‘Sept. 27: Another record-setting call’
Standard Podcast:
Play Now |
Play in Popup |
Download (325)
A couple quick updates from the call that Daniel and I had this Tuesday about all things hosting.
- New client information doc – We’ve condensed all information into a central Google Spreadsheet so that now the information for billing, hosting setup, and contact information is all in one document. Hopefully this will help us know where we’re at with everybody as we expand.
- Client outreach letters - Because of some unexpected work for that thing called school I wasn’t able to get letters out on Thursday, but a batch of 5-10 outreach letters will be going out first thing Monday morning. The revised letter is on Google Docs and is shared with the team if you have ideas or critiques.
- Education Sessions – Daniel and I will be brainstorming and drafting up some initial sessions to run clients through starting the week of October 7. We’ll be capping these at around 10 people but will be open to doing multiple sessions on a topic if there’s the demand for it.
That’s all for now.
Couple of quick updates on my end. We’re officially reincorporated as a C corp in the State of Florida, and have a new Federal EIN number. Susan Linch was amazing and took care of this for us. I also sent in the paperwork this morning to cancel our old EIN number.
Lastly, I’m going in to the Bank of America this morning to see what it would take to switch our account from Florida to Oregon. Because I’m the one dealing with the bank most of the time, I think it might make things easier to have it in Oregon.
… is how long this evening’s conference call. I believe it’s our shortest ever.
Andrew started the conversation with a report on the new client outreach we started at the end of last week. We’ve sent direct emails to two newspapers thus far with only one indirect response. Taking this as a good-ish sign, we’re going to email five more potentials on Monday and see what the reaction is. Andrew has shared the letter outline with the team that we’re using to craft these emails. Hopefully if we refine this process over time, the outreach will bear some fruit.
Miles is finishing up a list of current clients that we think are good candidates for switching from version 1 hosting to Managed Hosting. We’ll want to start that process as soon as possible, ideally before he leaves the country on vacation. On Tuesday, Andrew and I will want to talk about this, the process for scoping out design and contract work, regular client workshops, the best way to contact all of our clients at once, and a better spreadsheet for managing launches and contact information.
Continue reading ‘September 20, 2009: 28 minutes’
Standard Podcast [29:04m]:
Play Now |
Play in Popup |
Download (292)
On Tuesday, Andrew and I had the first of what will be a weekly series of check-ins for hosting. We have a pretty distributed approach to support and managing work, so it will be good to check-in regularly and talk about what’s working and what needs improvement.
At this point in time, we’re in the process of launching the last of the sites that started over the summer. Once that’s done, the normal workload should fall back to support requests as issues come up. Andrew and I will split up the work week such that responsibility will be divided based on when the support request comes in. Andrew is going to take Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays, and I’ll take Wednesdays and Thursdays. Our goal will be to respond as soon as possible to all requests during the work hours, and then as needed after hours. There’s a balance we’re going to have to strike between responding quickly to client requests and maintaining some level of sanity.
Continue reading ‘September 17, 2009: First weekly hosting meeting’
This week’s call was unexpectedly forced to become a text chat due to some difficulties with Skype. Not to be deterred though Daniel, Miles, Lauren, Greg, Adam, and myself typed out our meeting notes and ideas. While brief the “call” still hit on our main development progress and the upcoming ACP/CMA conference.
High Priority
To start things off I covered the Managed Hosting outreach goals for the coming months. Over the next few weeks Daniel and myself will be sending out emails to 10 new schools a week in order to reach out to perspective clients and bring new members into the Forum and Wiki community.
Daniel also covered preparation for the fast approaching ACP/CMA conference in Austin, TX. He’ll be putting together a budget for the event soon and then we’ll start getting business cards, t-shirts, stickers, and maybe even some DVD handouts together. Lauren also suggested the idea of doing some informal tweet-ups during the day.
Medium Priority
Thanks to a lot of hard work by Miles the first stage of the Connection Engine will be up and running soon. Once it’s up on the server we’ll create some test accounts to start putting it through its paces. Lauren and myself will then work on skinning it to fit in the spirit of Version 3 of copress.org.
We also discussed a new workflow for editorial ideas on the blog. We’ll be posting ideas to CoPress Micro with the hashtag #copressblog. Daniel also mentioned a list of ideas for things that we aim to accomplish this fall and will be sending it out to team members later this week.
Editorial/Community
- Monday – no content planned
- Tuesday – Vanessa, commenting policies
- Tuesday – Mo, version 0.2 Edit Flow
- Wednesday – Lauren, edu video #5
- Thursday – Adam, site launch roundup
- Friday or Saturday – Daniel, We Clicked On
Who would you like to hear from on TWIC?? Please add on…
–Craig Kanalley (Breaking Tweets)
–Kim Sommers (EIC of the Whitman Pioneer)
–Michael Poppel (Breaking News Online)
–Alex Klein (Duke Chronicle)
–Adam Klawonn and Aleksandra Chojnacka (2009 Knight Foundation News Challenge Winners)
We are digging for new topics especially for this week’s show!
–HTML v. CMS
–Twitter/Breaking Tweets
Recent Comments