Some stuff I've implemented already.

I'm jumping into this blog not quite at the beginning of this whole experiment with technology and social media, so I'll list a few things we've already done.

• Website redesign - I have an awesome web guy, Tom Semmes, who has helped me redesign the website from the ground up - in other words, not as part of a full rebrand (we'll get to that later), but just him and me thinking and coming up with better, simpler, more efficient, more member-friendly ways to do things. I won't go into all the details, but we've cleaned up the home page, added a "news" section, a "join" section, a "donate" section right on the front. We've taken out a bunch of unnecessary graphics, cleaned up the look of everything. We signed up with Google Analytics and are working on our search engine optimization - I'd love to sign up with Google Mini but we don't have the cash right now. That will be for a future project.

• Dumped our old CMS program which was cobbled together I don't know how, and signed on with Memberclicks. I cannot say enough good things about this company - they have enabled us to do so much more than we ever dreamed of with our membership database. We have a fully functioning searchable database, with permissions for every variation of groups we want. We added lots of demographic information, as well as member specialties, languages, religion, gender, etc. and will continue to add fields as they come up. We have created discussion forums, polls, saved searches... members can register and pay for events, pay their dues and tuition, upload photos, sign up for listserves.
  

• Created a group on Facebook (I did this a couple days ago so nothing to report on that yet).

OK I think that's enough for now. But these are the things I will be exploring in more detail as I try and figure out what's working and what's not, and if not, what I can do about it (given that there's only me to do this stuff).