Tag Archive for 'ACP/CMA'

November 8, 2009: NCMC09 recap

Another Sunday night, another team conference call. We skipped the week prior because some of the team was still traveling back from ACP/CMA. Joining me on the call were Greg, Miles, Sam, Andrew, and Lauren.

First at bat was a recap of ACP/CMA, what worked well, and what we want to do better next time. Andrew remarked that, for CoPress, the conference went as well as we could’ve hoped for. It would’ve been sweet if we had a booth, though. We learned from Logan while at the conference that the booths were only $650 and included four conference registrations. Originally, we thought that vendors were required to sponsor a part of the conference and that fee ran into the thousands of dollars (i.e. outside of our budget). The informal way we were there, though, was good for networking and being on panels was a plus. Andrew also remarked that at one of the panels he was at in the audience another audience member, unprompted, asked a question about us. Lauren thinks that, for next time, we should do more branding, have rack cards, etc. I’d personally like to be more “network-y” and talk with more people. In addition, I think it would be really cool to expand our coverage of the panels and make sure we have people covering each tech-related one. Last but not least, it would be really sweet to bring the entire team to the next conference we attend.

On the organizational side of things, I spent several hours on Sunday entering line items for invoices, receipts, etc. Our ledger should be completely up to date and, thanks to Albert’s efforts, we’ll be able to do up to date reporting on our revenues and expenses.

For the blog this week, Greg is putting together a post about how the Texas Tribune can be a model for student news organizations and Lauren will be writing one about transitioning your web staff from year to year. Lauren and I will also talk about the wiki, as we hope to start developing the content again.

 
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October 4, 2009: Introducing Will Davis

The biggest news of tonight’s call with Greg, Adam, Andrew, Lauren, Vanessa, and I was the addition of a new member to the team: Will Davis. Will is currently the Editor in Chief of The Maine Campus, a weekly paper in Maine that migrated to WordPress MU over the summer. He’s already an active WordPress developer and we’re stoked to have him join the project in a more formal way.

We also discussed the launch of our email newsletter. Andrew will be preparing a draft of the first one and we’ll be sending it out when Courier supports sending emails to existing WordPress users (which should be coming soon). It’s going to be a tool for pushing out emergency updates, as well as a regular summary of what’s going on with links to blog posts, a way to welcome new site launches to everyone else we host, and so on. It’s undecided as to whether anyone can sign up for this, or whether we’ll restrict it to just active clients.

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Planning community engagement for ACP/CMA

Note: This started as an e-mail thread but I’m opening it up to the blog for further discussion of an implementation strategy.

The ACP/CMA conferences are a perfect opportunity to use Twitter for community engagement, since attendees will likely have their laptops and everyone will be following #ona and #acp hashtags.

Twitter contests

At the beginning of CoPress’ panels, we should encourage the audience to follow us and announce that anything said during the panel — both from panelists and attendees — could be the answer to one of our trivia questions, which we’ll tweet afterwards. Since I’m not leading any of the panels, and because I’ll be at both conferences, I can be the person who picks the trivia question after the panels. This will probably only work if we have a decent prize like a CoPress t-shirt or a coffee mug.
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September 20, 2009: 28 minutes

… 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.

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