ICA Needs Your Skills
Submitted by icatri on Sun, 03/01/2009 - 19:06
- How-To Documentation: The new website needs some how-to documentation to explain to members how to publish a profile, a blog post, or an event. This is an immediate need that will help members make the best use of the new website. Contact Claire Doyle Ragin if you can help out.
- Feature Writing: The ICA website now enables all members to write blog posts. This is a great way of demonstrating to potential clients the wealth of talent we have in our group. Contact Claire Doyle Ragin if you have business or communications-related topics you'd like to write about on the ICA blog.
- Event Management: We have returned to speaker programs, and also hope to have portfolio roundtables and talent expos in the next year. These will require a lot of effort and coordination. Contact Mary Ann Bella if can help organize events.
- Marketing: One of the best values the ICA can provide to members is leads for jobs...but those leads will only come to us if the clients know about us. Cindy Turner has put together a marketing plan for getting the word out. Contact Cindy if you would like to participate.
- Membership Acquisition: Our speaker events and meetup site are already attracting a lot of interest in the community. We need to get the word out to others, and to recruit talented professionals to join ICA. Contact Nancy Oates if you'd like to help recruit new members to ICA.
- Website Administration: Now that the new website is launched, we will want to keep the content fresh with the latest news, events and jobs. Occasional software updates may be necessary, and members are sure to have questions as they update their profiles and post on their blogs. Having multiple people who know their way around the back end of the website will help spread the workload around and ensure that no one person is a bottleneck.
- Web Design & Development: Drupal allows us to be very flexible in how we structure the website as well as the look and feel. There are certainly improvements that can be made, and new features that we may want to add as time goes on. If you have experience with CSS and/or Drupal (or other content management system), your skills will be very valuable as we evolve the site.
- Proofreading: It never hurts to have a second set of eyes, especially as we push content directly to the website.
Although the following are not necessary yet, we may need people to fill these roles if we are successful:
- Front Page Editor: If a lot of members begin blogging, as we hope, it may be necessary to choose what content gets promoted to the front page, or to rotate content so that everyone gets front page exposure.
- Forum Moderator: Anyone who's run a successful forum will tell you that if you build it, someone will come along and say something stupid. If the forums are successful, we may need someone to step in on occasion if people violate the Terms of Service. And there are always spam-bots looking to place junk on forums; having someone keep ahead of those will ensure that we have quality content, not junk.

