Communications Charlie Vono Deputy Director for Communications Region VI [email protected] 30 January 2010.

Communications

Charlie Vono

Deputy Director for Communications

Region VI

[email protected]

30 January 2010

Objective of “Communications”

• To provide members with information they need to remain engaged and effective with Institute activities Local Events and Messages from National

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OBJECTIVE OF THIS BRIEFING: Provide information to Region and Sections by briefing these charts at the RAC meeting and sending them to Section webmasters/newsletter editors via email. Encourage use of communications tools.

• Great web sites of the West -- what’s out there now?

• How to publicize a conference

• Staying in touch with your members Data Maker Constant Contact (inputs from Tucson, Phoenix, SF, LA, & Utah)

Overview

Western Region Sections

• Antelope Valley• Arrowhead• China Lake• Los Angeles• Orange County• Pacific Northwest• Phoenix• Point Lobos

• Sacramento• San Diego• San Fernando Pacific• San Francisco• San Gabriel Valley• Tucson• Utah• Vandenberg

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Checked Sections Have SharePoint Web Sites

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HOW TO PUBLICIZE A CONFERENCE (1 of 3)

• Request Western Office announce via email to Southern California sections El Segundo Office (part time, Susan Goldstein -- [email protected])

• Postcards -- bulk rate, or 24.5 cents each, or lower if barcoded

• Advertise on the OC sharepoint website

• Aerospace America (contact Stephen Brock ([email protected]) Use the Bulletin Section Put a line in the calendar of events Place a short call for papers Purchase a small ad

• Section Newsletters – “Ads” yours or neighboring sections for a small fee or on a trade or courtesy basis

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HOW TO PUBLICIZE A CONFERENCE (2 of 3)

• Local Companies Work with active AIAA members who are employees to advertise in their companies They often have calendars, newsletters, websites, etc for these kinds of notices

• Use flyers -- simple, colored-paper fliers posted in companies, universities, local libraries, or air museums

• Universities Reach Universities through their student branches Offer a student discount and student track to help get their participation Get students to help run the event in exchange for a meal or two and free attendance

• Make sure you look at how the conference was promoted in the past• Speakers

Have a special speaker coming who might generate some buzz? Make sure you mention it Try to get the speaker of your choice through the speaker reimbursement program Look for info on www.aiaa.org under "My Section.“

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HOW TO PUBLICIZE A CONFERENCE (3 of 3)

• After the conference, get some advanced publicity for next year Place a picture and a paragraph in the "Bulletin" Send it to Christine Williams ([email protected]) If it's too late to print a picture from last year, “cook up” a picture that gives some anticipation

of the event such as your committee at an air museum

• Other Helpful Contacts: Kevin Kremeyer has had success promoting a new conference recently. He can share what

he did for the Homeland Security conference I've also copied Charlie Vono who might have some communication ideas and Regional Liaison, Stephen Brock.

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EXAMPLE

CONSTANT CONTACT

• Phoenix• Tucson• San Francisco• Utah• Los Angeles

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CONSTANT CONTACT – Phoenix (Ryan Carlblom)

• We have used Constant Contact for three seasons and have been pleased with the ability to send out event information in an efficient manner

• Some other methods are restricted to a limited quantity, and the Constant Contact system allows us to keep track of respondents, undeliverable mail, and allows us to make frequent updates to our database.

• Mark Longanbach was the first officer (previous chair) to implement the use of this tool, and has made a number of presentations on it at the Regional level.

• As a note, there is a significant savings if an entire year is paid at one time. This makes the tool more cost effective, too.

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CONSTANT CONTACT – Tucson (Jeff Jepson, Kirk Hively)

• Tucson “really likes” Constant Contact

• Easy to set up and makes the emails look very professional

• Easy to import mailing list and to set up separate categories for the main info group and the leadership council

• Use only a few forms, but many to choose from

• It is good to get the statistics on the number of emails sent, opened, etc.

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CONSTANT CONTACT – SF’s Analysis (Rick Kwan)

• Do not used Constant Contact to send out section mail, but the chair, Steven Cerri, uses it for his business market communication and likes it

• Constant Contact embeds a 1x1 pixel into messages which refer to a recipient-unique web address at: "http://rs6.net/on.jsp?....." (rs6.net is owned by Constant Contact.)

• What they are doing is tracking which web addresses got hits and howoften, time of day, etc. We have confirmed: if you use a graphical e-mail reader and always load images, you will get tracked. if you use a text e-mail reader, or turn off image loading a graphical browser, you will not get

tracked.

• Thus, the response numbers may be under-reported, depending on thehabits of your user population. Most of our users have very goodbandwidth, but some areas have not caught up, and therefore usersthere may turn off graphics, just to speed up their e-mail reading.

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CONSTANT CONTACT – San Francisco’s Concerns

• http://rs6.net, which belongs to Constant Contact, is the tracking site for a very large range (perhaps all) of their customers, including highly professionalones as well as perhaps ethically challenged ones.

• McAfee has reported some e-mail with links to rs6.net as spam; those are, ofcourse, the ethically challenged ones.

• Corporate IT shops will often screen mail according to what web addresses it attempts to access; some of them could screen out mail due to Constant Contact having a few bad apples among their customer base.

• Our chair, Steven Cerri, confirmed that he did get tracking data frome-mail addresses at nasa.gov and lmco.com.

• This means these corporate IT departments have not blacklisted rs6.net, and messages are being successfully delivered.

• But being good hackers, we're just a bit paranoid.

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CONSTANT CONTACT – San Francisco, what’s next

• Meanwhile, we've decided to experiment with our own home-brew multi-part e-mail, including both text and HTML versions.

• We were doing fine, until we found that Microsoft Exchange 2007 e-mail server is re-writing the text parts, in spite of our careful formatting.

• Furthermore, we've discovered other users on the web have reported the same identical problem, and no solution has been offered.

• We are considering our options, none of which are pleasant. • But this is probably far from your current area of concern.

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San Franciso Section has “…a higher portion of hackers, hackettes, and geeks (and geekettes?) among our membership than any other section” – thus they are keeping with their traditional site and they did an analysis of “Constant Contact” -- Rick Kwan

Constant Contact – A Local Utah Engineering Company

• A member of the Utah Section works for a field office of an international engineering company. They are dropping Constant Contact, primarily to seek a solution more compatible with their other data base. However, they are looking for the following functionality that CC does not have: Cannot send to part of your list; must create new list for each A group setting that could help ensure members on multiple lists only get 1 email/wk Allow users to request weekly digests of their emails instead of getting 1 at a time Drip Campaigns: it would be nice to be able to have a system that automatically resends

email based on campaigns and user actions. Global calendar that would allow all users to schedule emails off one “corporate” schedule

• The user goes on to say: “I would still recommend CC – it’s easy to use and cheap. The other alternative I would recommend is MailChimp – I originally looked into it to be able to integrate my email campaigns with my Google Analytics (website stats tracking).” -- both offer free trials

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Constant Contact – LA Section (Eliza Sheppard)

• For us, the free trial was not very useful because it only allows you to add 100 contacts. For smaller sections, they could really get some good use out of it.

• If anyone needs help with non-profit pricing, I can try to remember how I did it and send instructions. Also, you can pay with a credit card, but an invoice lets you send a check directly from the section account to avoid waiting for reimbursement

• For the LA section, we got the package with 501-2500 contacts and it was just over $250 for the year (at the nonprofit prepaid price). About half that for 500 or fewer

• It was fairly easy to upload Excel sheets of contact info for our Section. Not yet gone through the process of updating those with the latest membership list

• Also fairly easy to put together a relatively simple e-mail. I've only done one, and I didn't try a lot of the formatting features. We should set up some templates for our section to make it easier to just put in info and send the e-mails off to people.

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Constant Contact – LA Section (Continued)

• The percentage of people who open the e-mails seems really low. Without having some kind of baseline to compare to I have no idea if this is normal or if for some unknown reason it's abnormally low. It is really nice to have these metrics, though, and we'll be able to track things over time.

• We are still sending out e-mails for our dinner meetings, we need to convert that to Constant Contact to (hopefully) make her job easier, or make it so we don't have to be sending our e-mails at all.

• Constant Contact recently started an event service, where you can set up event webpages and take online RSVPs and payment. We looked into this, and I think for several reasons it didn't fit our needs as well as Eventbrite (which we've been using for the past year), though other sections may want to consider it as it may fit their needs.

• And as far as the SharePoint-based site goes, I originally set this up for our section but I haven't had much time to update it lately. The good news is that other council members HAVE been updating it (looks like Dean has made most of the updates recently), so it has at least solved our problem of a single-point-failure webmaster.

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Keeping up with emails using Data Maker

• Membership can change fast In the Utah Section, from Aug to Dec, there were about 80 new members – total 360

• Sending emails using Data Maker requires the following steps:

Extract email addresses and make sure they are correct Put them into a form that can be copied and paste them in the “BC:” field (Outlook)

• To help Sections, National could use a more compatible format Often, if the member does not have an email address, [email protected] is used Other members without email addresses have an empty field Some members have more than one entry Some email addresses are no longer valid

• Is there an easy way to sort out all of the members without email addresses and a way to flag the members with email addresses that are no longer valid?30

BACK UP CHARTS

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Young Professionals Monthly Newsletter

• Institute Activity Report:

The YP Committee started a monthly newsletter specifically for professional members age 35 and younger. Recent issues can be found at https://info.aiaa.org/SC/YPC/Newsletter/Forms/Sorted by date.aspx

I had a bit of trouble getting on, but after I logged into www.aiaa.org and just went to the info.aiaa.org/sc/ypc location I saw it was just the sharepoint. In any case, SCOTT you should make sure you review this newsletter each month. Can you get some section YP leads to write a brief event summary and include a photo for content?

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YOUR HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT

• Jump in and try the new Sharepoint tools Even if you have a great web site, especially if you don’t

• Check info.aiaa.org/Regions/West/ for the latest Log in and add your ideas to the team discussion board

• Contact me at [email protected] Or be my friend at Facebook – Charles Thomas Vono

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Advice to The Sections Concerning Approach

• Avoid numerous disjointed communications functions and products Webmaster Newsletter Editor Secretary

• Be active -- May need to actually drag info out of other officers Programs Chair – publicize upcoming programs and activities Career Enhancement Chair – publish an article about career advancement or retirement

planning Membership Chair -- disseminate information on membership upgrades, section

demographics, how to update your personal info in the AIAA database, etc Section Chair -- a short piece on aerospace in the local area and include mention that there

are great opportunities available for volunteers to help the council

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Who in Your Section is the Communications Leader?

WebNewspaper

eMails

MinutesPosters

Photos

Great Web Sites of the West

• Sharepoint Websites Utah Tucson Pacific Northwest

• Custom Websites Antelope Valley http://www.aiaa.av.org/ San Francisco http://www.aiaa-sf.org/ Los Angeles http://www.aiaa-la.org/

From Last Summer

Decisions for the Section

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Jump into Sharepoint?

Re-Organize Officer’s Roles?

Use Constant Contact?

Newspaper articles?

Combine Jobs?

Publish Newsletters only on the Web?