Privacy concerns are central to the good stewardship of any online, non-news communication.
Luckily, most of these can be quickly resolved by answering this simple question: “Did this person give me specific, prior permission to publish this personal information?” If so, if they knowingly opted-in, and you’re golden. If not, you’re not.
An opt-out option, after the fact of being published, never meets a best practice standard. No matter what the intention.
I’ve added a link on the home page to the online giving form. It links directly to the form — next week Evan’s going to tweak the form so that the form provides a link back to the general stuff if that’s what the user wants, but for now they are thrown right into the thick of it:
The blogging workshop turned out to be a huge success, with about twenty people showing up (I’m horrible at estimating headcounts, so feel free to correct me there). The questions were good, and the feedback I’ve gotten since the presentation has been positive.
The goal of the presentation was to show the variety of uses for blogging/WordPress, and we were successful in that.
It’s interesting that Keene State is pursuing Web 2.0 more through the staff than the faculty at this point — but I think it’s promising too. People showed up to this seminar because they know that blogging can help them to be more effective in their jobs. I like a crowd like that, because if you can solve their problems they become powerful evangelists.
Here is a list of sites we looked at the blogging workshop:
The latest issue of Newsline is up. Commencement is front and center, but the monthly journal also talks about our student team’s EPA award, LEED certification for Pondside III, the KSC 100 blog… and the sad news of the passing of Kate Phillips, a former professor of mine.
Here she is in a small clip from a 1937 film:
One story I’ll share here about Kate, because she deserves it… I had her as a professor in 1989, during a semester where I was quite lost in terms of what I wanted to do. Or actually, I was lost in terms of college, because I had decided to become a folk singer and move down to Athens, GA — so schoolwork was just not a priority.
Kate asked me why I wasn’t showing up for screenwriting class when I obviously loved screenwriting so much, and I explained that I was quitting college at the end of the semester to pursue my dream. She told me that if I loved music I could do music on the side, and I’d enjoy it as much, or more. She said to trust her — she’d been there and she knew.
And more than anybody, there was just a depth of understanding in the way she said that to me, so cheery on that Spring day a couple weeks before finals.
Everybody I knew tried to talk me out of quitting school. My parents. Many friends. All my professors.
And I did it anyway. But the only person that really made me reconsider going, just for a day, was Kate. As things went from bad to worse in Athens, I’d think back occasionally on that conversation on that day. In fact, I occasionally still do. I can remember the bright room in Morrison, the rustle of the trees, and most of all, the feeling that when she told me that I didn’t have to play life as an all-or-nothing game that she really knew what she was talking about.
Looking at the obituary in The New York Times, and at her IMDb list, it becomes just how apparent that she really did know. She succeeded at being a star and a screenwriter. And then she decided to succeed at being a wife, a mother, and a teacher — and to do that, she voluntarily left her previous success behind her.
She was so incredibly content with the choices she had made in life. She put her heart into what she did, and never stopped laughing.
So this is not a mindblowingly new idea, but we’ve started to provide press kit-like functionality to some of the releases on the Media Relations blog.
What do these releases look like? Well, they’re sort of like a normal physical world press kit. It’s focussed on a particular initiative, project, or person, and it brings together multiple resources useful to a reporter writing a story. So rather than Robin sending a reporter multiple links via email to background sources, she can send one link out to the online press kit, which nicely encapsulates resources for the story.
The Biodiesel kit, for example, combines the coverage we’ve received so far into an easy to scan format, and serves to highlight the great coverage we’ve already gotten on the biodiesel project: scanning down the coverage section you see that this is no small story. Additionally, some primary resources, like the 53 minute presentation the students gave on the project, are made available, as is the contact information for key people on the project. This two minute video describes how it’s structured (turn up your audio):
If you’ve spotted the fact that this is not that different from dialing up the web elements on a web-based press release, well, you’re sharp. It’s not. But it’s one more way we’re trying to reduce barriers to turning a great story we know about to a great story the world knows about.
We’re Online Communications, an office in Keene State College’s Advancement Division. We try to get Keene State’s story out and build a stong community of support and service through the use of neat online tools.
This blog is the story of how we’re going about that.
