Yesterday morning we sent out our first CoPress newsletter to all clients. We worked quickly in order to push it out this week and there’s definitely some things that we’ll be able to do better next time. This is sort of a mind dump of those ideas so that we have them around and so that everyone can add to them.
Somethings that will be done in the future…
- Graphics and layout - We definitely need some things to spruce up the newsletter. The text seemed a bit heavy at the length that we did. Lauren will be creating a sweet banner graphic and we’ll need to use some section headings for the next newsletter.
- The small things - Among other things we should be signing these either as from the team or as from the individual team member that sent it out. I forgot to do that for this one and it seemed a bit unprofessional. I’m open to suggestions though as to whether these should be signed by the team, CoPress Hosting, etc. Thoughts?
- Keeping track of usage - We’re using bit.ly for tracking the links within the newsletter and since yesterday most of the links in the email got at least a half dozen clicks. To gauge our effectiveness we’ll want to keep close watch of these.
- More fine-tuned settings - Hopefully future versions of Courier will be adding more fined tuned subscription and mailing settings so that those who are simply users on our site but not clients will have the option to unsubscribe. This will help make it so that people don’t view the newsletter as spam.
That’s all I got for now. Any thoughts and feedback on the email are much appreciated and will be taken to heart for future newsletters. At least we now have a way to reach out to our growing base of clients and community.
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.
My DC trip has been finalized: I’ll be there Wednesday to Saturday with limited availability (probably just the evenings). From Wednesday to Friday, I’ll be out in the field working on National Park employee video profiles as part of a University of Miami School of Communication project.
On Saturday, I’ve been invited to this:
http://revenuetwopointzero.com
I had no idea this was going on until earlier today. I have to leave before it’s over, but I’ll definitely have my CoPress hat on and will see if we can add college news to the mix (I’m sure a lot of it will be translatable).
The hashtag is #rev2oh. Let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to ask/discuss.
While going through my harddrive on the long bus ride, I came across this text from the first splash page that Megan Taylor and I put together:
The coPress vision is to synthesize an open source, college and/or local news consortium around an online platform (or CMS) that easy to deploy, simple to use, and allows for varying degrees of customization. As crucial as the software is an eco-system of developers and innovators from our sector (i.e. student newspapers and possibly small local papers) that help to continually evolve the platform. One side effect of putting this together digitally would be to also create a comprehensive knowledge center for newsrooms that are interested in using the platform and joining the eco- system. We are currently collaborating on wiki and through a Google Group. Check back soon for more updates!
I think it serves as a good reminder as to the broader goals of what we’re trying to do, especially as I try to reformulate and synthesize the about page. Keep it up, guys!
I’ll be on a 19 hour bus ride this Sunday so, unless someone wants to Skype-Out to my cell (which probably would cost a bit), I won’t be able to make the weekly conference call. I have a few things I’d suggest you guys talk about, though:
- Hosting – Now that we’ve launched our first website, we should spend 5 or 10 minutes going around the table and discussion what we think was good and ugly about the launch. It’s good for both a recap and to develop a checklist for the next site we move and launch. If you have anything that comes to mind immediately, leave it as a comment on this post or on the agenda.
- Policies – We’re now an organization, so I think we need to start penning common organization, communication, and technological policies to paper. For instance, someone (I’m still not sure who) changed the permalink structure on the main website in recent history. It’s easy to forget, but changing the URLs on a production site can suddenly lead to 404’s from every single link we’ve ever head. This isn’t good. I’m still waiting to hear back as to how recently this happened (to figure out how we should address this small fire), but the takeaway is this: we shouldn’t have any more unilateral technology decisions. There were a couple of typos in the blog post published last night, so it’s probably important to make sure all of the content we publish sees another pair of eyes. These are the types of policies we should brainstorm.
- Benchmarks for the near future - We created an Excel spreadsheet that identified benchmarks for CoPress. I think these should exist at the front of our brains a bit more, and that we should revisit these at the conference call.
Anything I’m missing? I think either Adam or Joey could be good facilitators for the call.
I’ll be mostly off the grid from Feb. 5-15 because of a trip to Idaho to cover the Special Olympics winter games with a group from the University of Miami, along with students from various other universities.
I expect to have Internet access when I’m not working, which could be about 20 hours a day. I’ll have my phone with me, of course, so text message or direct message is the best way to get in touch with me for anything pressing.
We’re mostly doing videos and photos, so there are periods when I’ll be completely out of touch.
I’ll keep up with things as best as I can, as well as weigh in as much as possible.
CoPress now has an office hours calendar that should be shared with everyone on the team. When/if you’re going to be away from the web for more than a couple of days, please designate it here. When you set scheduled office hours, those will also go here.
Just a quick update that the CoPress conference calls podcast is now available and (semi) up to date in the iTunes Store. Here’s the link if you want to resubscribe.
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