Member Communications Committee meeting

Meeting date/time: December 4th (Saturday) at 6pm.
Where: Global Gallery at 3535 North High Street
Who: Members of the co-op who are interested in continuing or beginning to help with member communications such as the website, the glass case, and other forms of member co-op communications.

I am thinking a tentative agenda might be a good idea, so here goes. Please make suggestions in the comments.

1. Edit/approve agenda
2. Decision-making process (what is the board using? maybe pattern what we use based on that.)
3. Cover objectives of the Member Communications Committee
4. Discuss current state of Member Communications: what is being done now, who is doing it, what are the needs, what are the strengths
5. Discuss how to organize the committee- subcommittees? Current subcommittees: display case & website. What tasks fall under this committee and what tasks don’t?
6. Discuss need for additional officers, appoint additional officers

Agenda looks great! Thanks, Genelle!
I will try to get some clarification from current employees that may be working on website and/or contributed in the past. I will also encourage them to attend this meeting.

We (BOT) are trying to get the passwords to the website sorted out! Stay tuned on that one.

You should know that several people have suggested that a member information corner might be a good use for the soon-to-be-vacated Simply Living corner at the market. We are going to run this by the staff at the staff meeting Thursday a.m. for reactions and feedback, and also let them know about this meeting.

Thank you ALL for being on the ground floor of this awesome effort!

I just spoke with Judith Brooks at the market who has been doing a lot of the member communications and invited her to the meeting. She is going to be out of town that day, so she won’t be able to attend, but we set a phone conference time for tomorrow (December 2) at 10am so we could talk about things.

I just uploaded the Oberlin Consensus Model offered up by Beth Binkovitz as a possibility in regards to landing on a decision-making process. It would be very helpful if everyone planning to come to the meeting could read it. It’s in the right sidebar of this page under “Attachments”. Thanks, Beth!

To keep in mind for the agenda for the meeting on Saturday.

From the unapproved 11.23.2010 board meeting minutes:

Establishment of Member Communications Committee
Committee will be for maintaining member showcase (display case), website, monthly newsletter, and other member communications as befitting a cooperative market.

Needs to come up with process for who posts to the website, possibly have a staff member on the committee. Committee needs to have access to login info for the website. Committee will have chairperson at the start and then committee can decide for how long. Hope that those working on member communications through the display case working group will continue to remain involved. Judith Brooks works might have a password in order to get access to the website.

Hansen motioned to create the committee and nominate Genelle Denzin to become chair, Seconded by Tryon.
Yea – Merrill-Payne, Hansen, Tryon, Liuzza, Pollard, Jesser | Nay – | Abstain -
Motion Passed. Genelle Denzin not present to accept. Will accept or decline via email.

I spoke with Judith this morning. Here are my notes:

Judith and Kevin are updating Facebook as close to daily as possible. (They are doing great with this- I’d suggest going to take a look.) Co-op Facebook

The Twitter account (ccmcoop) is no longer active (as of late October), and Judith feels that between her and Kevin there isn’t the understanding of Twitter to successfully do it.

Currently Judith is the only person with a login to the website. She is going to log in and figure out a way to create a login for me, then email me when that’s done. She has been updating the website with sale information as often as possible, but it does need updating now.

The newsletter that was going out via email was initiated by Gabe. He used Constant Contact to create and distribute the newsletter, but the account has been canceled. So currently there is no newsletter going out.

Finally, based on a lot of great reviews of the market on Yelp, they contacted Judith and tried to get her to sign up for an account there. It’s very expensive ($300+/month) so she kept saying no and the rep ended up giving her access to the page anyway to update sales information there. She is going to log on there soon to be sure that is still the case.

I think this is everything we talked about.. Judith was very open to sharing with me a picture of the current state of member communications and put trust in the group to make good decisions about next steps.