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TAC Team Webinar: December 9, 2011

Title: TAC Team: Strategy, Ideas, Etc

Description: We’re overdue to spend some time chatting together….collaborating, asking and answering questions, brainstorming, etc. We’ll talk about some plans from national first, then just open it up for a discussion session, q/a, etc.

Date & Time: Friday, December 9th, 2011 at 4:00 pm PST

Please register for the above meeting by visiting this link: http://tenthamendmentcenter.enterthemeeting.com/m/E78954EK

Once you have registered, we will send you the information you need to join the webinar.

What Next? Things to do after 6 learning steps.

Now that you’ve gone through the first 6 steps of learning some basics, the next question is probably “Ok, what do I do now?”

Since we want you to be a self-starter, to experiment, to test, to develop your own system – we’re not going to tell you exactly what to do now, or at any future turn. We will, however, provide guidance, ideas, and guidelines when necessary and/or possible. And, most importantly, you’ll want to share, question, and collaborate in the TAC hotline. That way, you can harness the power of personal experience – from other TAC chapter team members around the country. Make sure to join in or email us to request access if you’re not there yet!

But, for now, some introductory ideas. What to do now?

1. Write a blog post. Get in the habit of doing so as often as you’re able to

2. Share your blog post with others on TAC hotline – ask for feedback and ideas

3. Share your post on your chapter Facebook page. Interact with people there.

These are VERY basic steps, but essential to do regularly.

For more information – in more detail too – on these and other actions you can take, CLICK HERE (.pdf) to see the TAC webinar document on basic steps to building a successful chapter.

Embedding photos, video & audio into your posts

Using the More Tag

Best Practices for New Chapter Coordinators

When you’re first starting up a new TAC chapter, there’s so many things that could be done that it tends to be a bit daunting even to experiences activists. For some best practices at this stage, we recommend:

1. New posts on the website: 1-2 weekly at most (more than that will get lost in the shuffle). They can be a full article, or as short as a couple sentences and a youtube video. As you post new content, you’ll want to share that link on the facebook page. See here for some info:
http://grassroots.tenthamendmentcenter.com/posting-articles-on-your-facebook-fan-page/

2. Facebook invitations – start by inviting your full personal friend list to join.

3. Facebook growth – slow, steady addition of new people on the page…Andrew has used this technique with great success:
http://grassroots.tenthamendmentcenter.com/growing-your-facebook-fan-page/

Once this becomes a regular rotation, it’s good to move to some higher level items:

1. Bringing in outside contributors for articles, and even admin support for the many tasks that are needed to fully grow the chapter. A team of tenthers in your area

2. Sending out updates to supporters

3. Begin thinking about strategies to have local meetings on the 10th

4…and the list can go on and on….and on.

Most importantly, though, these are recommended best practices, not rules. It’s recommended to start with this as a guideline and then develop techniques that work best for you.

Creating an Event Calendar

1.  Go to http://calendar.google.com
2.  Create an account or sign in with pensacola@tenthamendmentcenter.com (which forwards to you) at Google Calendar.
3.  Create a calendar, named (CHAPTER) Tenth Amendment Center events
4.  give the calendar a name, description, location, and make sure it’s checked to be public
5.  once it’s created, click settings
6.  on calendar details, scroll down to “embed this calendar” and click “Customize the color, size, and other options”
7.  the ONLY change you need to make is to change the width from 800 to 580
8.  click “update html”
9.  Copy the HTML code
10.  Go to your Events page – or create a new page named “Events” if you don’t have one already
11.  Make sure you’ve clicked “HTML” in the top right corner of where you’re editing
12.  Paste the calendar code
13  Save, publish, update

About Pages

In WordPress, you can write either posts or pages. When you’re writing a regular blog entry, you write a post. Posts automatically appear in reverse chronological order on your blog’s home page. Pages, on the other hand, are for content such as “About Me,” “Contact Me,” etc. Pages live outside of the normal blog chronology, and are often used to present information about yourself or your site that is somehow timeless — information that is always applicable. You can use Pages to organize and manage any amount of content.

Other examples of common pages include Copyright, Legal Information, Reprint Permissions, Company Information, and Accessibility Statement. (By the way, it’s a good idea to always have an about page and a contact page — see this advice from Lorelle.)

In general, Pages are very similar to Posts in that they both have Titles and Content and can use your site’s Presentation Templates to maintain a consistent look throughout your site. Pages, though, have several key distinctions that make them quite different from Posts.

What Pages Are:

What Pages are Not:

  • Pages are not Posts, nor are they excerpted from larger works of fiction. They do not cycle through your blog’s main page. (Note: You can include Posts in Pages by using the Inline Posts Plugin.)
  • Pages cannot be associated with Categories and cannot be assigned Tags. The organizational structure for Pages comes only from their hierarchical interrelationships, and not from Tags or Categories.
  • Pages are not files. They are stored in your database just like Posts are.
  • Although you can put Template Tags and PHP code into a Page Template, you cannot put these into the content of a Page and expect them to run. (Note: You can achieve this by using a PHP evaluating Plugin such as Exec-PHP.)

Creating Pages

To create a new Page, log in to your WordPress installation. Select the AdministrationPagesAdd New option to begin writing a new Page.

Step 6 for Coordinators: Comment Moderation

Step 6 for new TAC Coordinators is to set up an account with LiveFyre.  This is a 3rd party commenting system, which adds the commenting functionality to your chapter’s website. It integrates quite well, and adds some great features not available in standard commenting system.

This is a short step, but ensures that you’ll be set up to control and moderate comments as needed.

1. Go to http://www.livefyre.com and sign up for a free account

2. Stop by the TAC hotline, and tag Michael Boldin in a post to let him know theusername that you created LiveFyre – we’ll upgrade you to administrator for the commenting system.

3. When people leave comments on the website, you’ll be able to reply to them from the dashboard, and when you’re logged in to the dashboard, you’ll also be able to go directly to each article and leave comments without having to log in again.

Here’s a quick introduction to LiveFyre

http://www.livefyre.com/features/

Step 5 for Coordinators: Sharing a Post on Facebook

Now that you’ve written a new post from Step 4, the next step for a new coordinator is to share that post on Facebook.

Here’s how to do it:

Get the Flash Player to see this video.


Click here for Step 6

Step 4 for Coordinators: Writing a Post/Article

The fourth step to take as a new TAC coordinator is to write a new Post, also known as a blog or article, which will run on your chapter’s website. As you get things started, this is the most important function to learn and do on a regular basis. While the number of posts you write will vary greatly based on your inspiration and time, our recommendation is a minimum of 1 per week, and an average of 2 per week to get the chapter off the ground.

Here’s how to do it:

IF YOU ARE LEADING A LOCAL, REGIONAL, OR OTHER CHAPTER WITHIN A STATE

In this situation, your state chapter website will be set up to display a “widget” of your local chapter’s posts in the right sidebar. That means you’ll have to do a little extra to make sure they show up there. Not much, but a little. On each and every post you write, you’ll need to select a category associated with your sub-chapter. For example, if you’re running the Northern California chapter, there will be a category called Northern California in your categories list. Check the box associated with that chapter before publishing your post and you’ll be good to go! (you can use other categories too, but you must at very least choose your sub-chapter category or things won’t work right)

See this video on categories and how to use them

Click Here for Step 5