Grange Action Program

Successful Actions in Electronic Communications

In June 2007, the Successful Actions Teleconference took on a different format. Instead of hearing from two individual Granges about their successes, we discussed a topic of interest to many of our callers – electronic communications. It’s a broad topic including such things as email notices to attract members, to connect with our current members, distribute newsletters, having a website and using a website to promote our Granges, to using a distance learning by means of an online meeting format, participants were able to view as well as discuss websites from National, State, and local Granges.

Ravena, Montague Granges, Fredonia, Alaska State Grange, Pleasant Valley Grange uses free yahoo website.

Many State Granges are using their websites to share information with their members.

www.Ravenagrange.org

Dorie Gedris from National Grange started our conversation about websites drawing on her Masters level studies in Marketing Information Technology, and her professional work for an internet marketing company where she analyzed websites, built websites, and implemented marketing strategies online.

“You may be aware that National Grange is in the process of redoing all their websites,” says Dorie. “We’re segmenting all our sites, separating our content into smaller pieces. What I’ll call mini-sites. There will be sites for Junior Grange, a main site for National Grange, Grange Youth, and Grange Store.”

“One of the sites that we’ve recently redone is http://nationaljuniorgrange.org. This is the first one that has been done. It’s completed. All the content has been analyzed, we looked at how we should lay it out.”

Dorie shared the structure of the nationaljuniorgrange.org site. She highly recommends that you start building a site by using a site map.

“You should do a site map, because it lays out the content. You identify the pathway that users might go. Some people used to call it breadcrumbs. We need to make it easy for everyone to find any bit of information that they might possibly want to know. You start out with the home page and then move to the first level of navigation.”

“On the Junior Grange website, the first level of navigation is: About Junior Grange, How to Join, Guidebook, Community Service, Reports & Forms, Merit Badges, and Programs. These are visible on every page of the site. When you click on one of the first levels such as About Junior Grange, then you’ll see on the left side the second level of navigation: Aims and Purposes, Regional Workshops, National JG Newsletters. These are the stepping stones to go deeper into the site and into the content of the site. A site map lays out all these stepping stones and helps you organize it.”

“You can actually view the site map and there you can see how everything is laid out on the site. If you’re ever wondering, ‘hmmm… I wonder where I could find… you can consult the site map. Sometimes site maps are very detailed, sometimes they are more general. The Junior Grange site is not terribly detailed because there is not so much content. The National Grange site will be much more detailed because there is much more content. A site map is extremely important.”

“We asked Jennifer who does all our design work, to come up with a design for our sites that we can use across all four ‘brands’ – Junior Grange, Grange Youth, National Grange, and Grange Store – but each will have its own distinguishing characteristic such as the shoes for Junior Grange. So when the other sites are unveiled, you’ll see a connection between all the sites, but each will be slightly different in their own way. For instance the Youth will have the green and gold with the keys because that’s what they are known for.”

Participants also viewed the newly developed California State Grange Youth website at www.cagrangeya.com.

“That stands for California Grange Youth Activities,” says Karen Heckman. “We’re just developing it right now, so if you see some print that looks like a foreign language, it’s just gobble-de-gook that will need to be replaced.”

Site-building software often puts together popular formats using Latin to show how a particular layout will look. And then you edit their format, replacing the Latin with your own information and content.

“We’re tying to have a new, fresh look” says Karen. “We’ve had some re-organization at the state level. So essentially the new Director of Youth Activities started to work on building this, and our state youth committee and officers working on the youth end deciding what they want on their site.”

Karen guided participants through the navigation links of the site describing what each link either has or will have on it. There are links to provide information for the State-wide talent show, youth activities, camps, Junior Grange, events, California State Grange’s EXPO, news, the California State Grange Foundation, membership application, classified ads, Grange sponsors, and a “contact us” page so users can get in touch. Handbooks for Junior Grange, Youth Fairs, EXPO are posted along with photographs of young people who are involved with Grange. Photos are both on individual pages as well as on slide shows that are available on certain pages.

“A unique link that we brainstormed about at our last session is Classifieds,” says Karen. If someone has animals but doesn’t have someone to show them, if they are looking for a young person to show them, they can list it there. If the kids are looking for a specific thing that they need for the Fair program, they can have it listed there. For security purposes, to make sure that our young people don’t get approached by strangers, once this site is set up, the email will go directly to the State Youth Activities Director and Ed will send it out to the appropriate Youth or Junior Grange member. So it will be a way to link the communities across the state with kids and vice-versa.”

When you’re building a site, they often set you up with a template that has photographs to hold the place, anticipating that you’ll replace those photos with pictures of your own. Compelling photographs show people’s faces. It’s more important to see the expressions on people’s faces than it is to see their legs or feet. When you’re taking photographs for a website, try to take close-ups. If you’re selecting photographs that have already been taken, look for the shots that show not only people doing something, but also show how they feel about what they’re doing. Learn how to crop out distractors like overhead lights or objects in the foreground or background. And choose photographs that make Grange look like fun!

“The kids really like the appearance of this site - our state youth committees have been looking at it. They like the colors and the denim look,” says Karen.

“What you’re saying,” adds Dorie, “is really important – that you really got everyone involved. You had all the stakeholders come together and buy into the website and what’s going on the website. You really gave them some control over what is going on there. It’s extremely important. For instance at National Grange, we work very closely with all the departments to make sure they are going to be happy with the information that’s on there. With Junior Grange, we worked very closely with Ann to make sure that it’s what she needs, it’s what the kids need, and also what the leaders need. So I think the fact that you did that in California is fantastic and it needs to be done across the board.”

Karen agrees. “That’s what is drawing the kids into this. If they don’t like something, they just say ‘you know, we really don’t like that.’ At the last meeting we had, they expressed what they wanted. They want a link that shows all the state Youth Committee members and an email. State Grange has made the emails go right to State Grange and then when it gets to the State Grange mailbox, it routes it right to the kids so we’re not dealing with putting their personal emails on a site where anybody could have get a hold of. So that helps with the security. They also want a bulletin board with what’s coming up, what are your thoughts. In the bottom corner where you can add links, another idea is a place where kids can go for homework help.”

“They’re working on it. The biggest problem is that when Ed started working on it, it was towards the end of school and the kids were busy with finals and trying to get through the end of the school year. But it’s coming together.”

Stephen Coye guided participants through the Ravena Grange website – www.ravenagrange.org. Menu items on the left side represent the first level of navigation with other items available when you click on: About Ravena Grange, Community Outreach, Legislative Alerts, Activity Photos, Blogs, Ravena Junior Grange, Event Calendar, Public Supper Schedule, Web Links, and Tri-County Fair Society. Most of these links have additional information.

For instance under About Ravena Grange you’ll find information about the following:

The Community Outreach link provides an opportunity for Ravena Grange to share what they do to be of value to the community in medical, educational, and social arenas. The Legislative Alerts link is extensive, listing the State Grange priorities, our state representatives for Coeyman’s Hollow, linking with National Grange’s legislative alerts.

“We added a new feature recently where we’ll post one of the State Grange policy statements once a month or so,” says Stephen. “What generates the most number of hits on our site are the Activity Photos. We have several photo albums available – outreach, Junior Grange, the Dictionary Project, and general activity photos.”

“We rent space on our site to the Tri-County Fair Society for promotion of Grange activities at the fair which happens to be three counties in this particular area. When we have a dinner or a special activity there will also be a page for that. For example we had a ham dinner for the benefit of the Little Red Schoolhouse Museum Society in Coeymans Hollow and there was a page up to advertise the dinner and from that page there is a link that lets people sign up for email reminders about our dinners. The list is not huge at this time, but it grows a little bit along. People are interested in finding out what we’re doing.”

Stephen adds, “In the last six months or so, the website has picked up, now we’re getting well over 1000 hits a month. In fact, the last time I checked it, we’d had 1325, and it’s only the 20 th of the month and there’s still 10 days left, so I think we’re going to go all out this time. It is a lot of work, but it’s worth it.”

Vinnie Kirmss from Ravena Grange adds, “When someone passes away, there’s a memorial page for that Granger on the website, there’s a picture and a memorial that is left up for a month or so.”

“That’s right,” Stephen says. “Hopefully we don’t have to use that one too often.”

When asked about the server, Stephen replies, “We use Biz Helper through the National Grange, and I might add that I’m very, very satisfied with them. It’s a template driven webform. We set up an account with them. There are a number of choices for different templates so you can change the look of the website from time to time.”

“The cost is $19.95 per month which covers the hosting, the URL, the software, as many changes as you go in and update it, the training. You should get a certain number of emails addresses with the service,” says Dorie.

“I chose to use my personal email service where I have the chance to include a number of mailboxes, and just made one of them for Ravena Grange,” says Stephen.

Mik Muller from Montague Grange in Massachusetts writes website software and shared a site that he set up for the Pomona in Franklin County, Massachusetts. The site is at www.ma-pomona19.org.

“This is a site that I actually set up for our Pomona. Unfortunately there is not that much buy-in yet. So far only Shelburn, Guiding Star, and Montague Granges are posting their events to the calendar. At this point it’s sort of one-man push to get our Granges to use the site, but some of our Granges are quite small in terms of active members.” says Mik.

“The photo on the home page is of Montague Grange. There are a few Grange members along with members of the community who came to a lecture program that we held.”

“I did a history paper on the Grange,” says Mik, “and one of the things that I found was that National Grange and State Grange were really aggressive in flyer-ing and pamphlet-ing in the early days, and that accounts for the phenomenal growth in the first ten years of the organization. They bought their own presses and did quite a lot of outreach, and that’s how they did it – just printing and printing and printing. They had handouts just everywhere. Membership was an explosion really. Millions and millions of people joined in just a short amount of time. They really used the technology.”

“Our membership has gone down while our country’s and world’s population has gone up. Less and less people know what we’re doing. Electronic technology – websites and email - is an unbelievably cheap and cost effective way to get in touch with everybody – and we should take a page from our own history to use this new media to get people to know more about Grange and why they should be part of us.”

“A site that looks a lot like the Grange site is one that also runs my software is the town of Montague website and I was thinking. Maybe something Granges can do is if their towns don’t have local community websites, the Grange could help the town develop a site, sponsor it, and then have a strong presence on that site. Granges used to be the centers of a lot of communities – everybody knew everybody and Grange did a lot to help publicize what was going on in the community. If Grange were to sponsor a town site, and then have a strong presence on that site, it could help raise people’s awareness of our existence.”

When you consider Grange’s strengths, one of those great strengths is to be able to facilitate community groups to make things happen. Community service and getting things done in the community is something that Grangers know how to do. Grangers may not know how to build a website, but they do know how to engage groups in the community to make things happen in their communities.

Mik agrees. “Oh absolutely! And there is somebody in every community who knows how to do a website. Grange could take a role in finding that person and engaging the community in designing a site.”

On the www.ma-pomona19.org site, you can see video of a Grange Family Dance, sign up for email updates, and visit the “Corkboard” area to find out what’s going on in Montague Grange.

“We’re actually uploading audio recordings of our meetings now and make them available with out minutes. We actually lost some members because they couldn’t make meetings and didn’t know what was going on. They didn’t feel involved. Now they can find out – usually the day after the meeting is held,” said Mik.

Because Mik is in the website business, he was able to share insights about what makes websites work for you. “It’s critical that your website is interactive. I think it’s best when people can come in and post information on their own That way the website is being updated by multiple people. You don’t just have one webmaster, but all the members can post information. You don’t have one person who becomes a bottleneck. And then other people will come back to your site because chances are that there’s new information going up all the time – from all kinds of people.”

“I’d like to see an electronic communication committee both at National and State level to help local Granges develop their presence on the internet. Every Grange should have their own site, or have a strong presence on their community’s sites,” said Mik.

When asked about the Log In section on www.ma-pomona19.org, Mik responded, “You have the right to control who has the right to input information into the site. And then when you sign up, it gives you the option to subscribe to specific pieces of the site. You might say, send me updates when something is posted for Guiding Star Grange, or you might sign up just for the corkboard or calendar.”

“If you go to www.montaguema.net which is a site that I set up for my hometown, you’ll see what I mean by having a strong presence on a site that’s intended for everyone in our community. You’ll see all kinds of content there, including information about Montague Grange. If you click on Montague Grange, you’ll see a picture of our Grange Hall, it tells when our meetings are, how people can rent the Hall and get involved. And then there’s a corkboard that announces events and other things. Last month on the Successful Actions Teleconference I talked about our Grange getting this grant to take care of a wildlife management area – and that’s described in an article that starts out, ‘Kudos to Montague Grange.’ So not only are we providing information for our members, but we’re helping the whole town know what we’re doing. Now there are well over 1000 hits per day on this town site – and Grange is there. There’s a link that brings them back to the Grange website which just generates more interaction.” said Mik.

“I’d like to see more and more presence on our town’s site, so people will come to see the Grange as part of life in our town – and a service to the town in its own way,” said Mik.

“Something to keep in mind is that this is a new medium. The younger population is very adept and savvy about the internet. The more popular sites for them are not the ones with pretty looking pages. They’re the ones where they can go and use like YouTube and MySpace and these sites that are very interactive where they feel like that they can get involved and can put their own content there. The layouts should be templatized and free-flowing and not static. They won’t go back to sites that aren’t updated a lot, but tend to go back to sites where they can have a lot of input. More and more are getting their own Blackberry devices that they can use to browse websites. They want places where they can kind of live online,” Mik said.

Karen agrees, “When we were online talking about all this, the kids had the chance of sending private messages to each other. in touch privately with one another. So while we were dialoguing, they were dialoging. One idea was to have some kind of a gimmick that changes maybe on a weekly basis. You’d have to come back to the site to get the next piece of the puzzle and then when you get all the pieces at the very end, you enter it into a contest and then there’s a drawing. What they’ll come up with exactly, I don’t know, but that’s what they’re talking about to keep kids coming back to the website. The more kids that come back, they hope they’ll be able to get these kids to join Grange.”

The next site participants looked at was Perry Valley Grange’s – www.perryvalleygrange.org. At the time of the teleconference, Perry Valley was promoting a corn and lobster dinner on their home page with pictures from last year’s events. All the teleconference participants were impressed and intrigued with the size of the lobsters. A photograph also promoted their Fall Fest quilt raffle. Like other sites, Perry Valley Grange has several layers of navigation and information. Navigation sites include:

A feature that leads off the links is called “What’s New on the Website?” At the time of the teleconference 11 items were posted here. It’s a quick link that allows users to identify new postings without having to hunt for them.

Potomac Grange also has a site – www.potomacgrange.org, that is maintained by Stephanie in the National Grange office. Dorie indicated that this site was built on the same Biz Helper program that Ravena Grange uses.

Pleasant Valley Grange in California uses a free service from yahoo.com. You can find this site by going to http://groups.yahoo.com and then typing in pleasantvalleygrange.org.

“This is a very simple and free membership website to set up. It’s not so much designed to help promote your Grange to the general public, but it is very helpful to keep your members informed,” said Bob McFarland from Pleasant Valley Grange. “You can see that you have the ability to put in files, photos, and forms. You can have the site restricted to members or open to the public. They let us put a general description and photographs there for everyone to see. And then our members can subscribe to the site to read announcements or we can post our minutes and that kind of thing.”

Yahoo groups also provide an easy way to create an email group which takes so much work out of a secretary’s or anyone who might need to get information out to a large group of people quickly and easily. One click can send out a message to everyone in the group.

“We have a mailing list at Montague Grange where we can easily have communication between meetings. In effect, it can act as a kind of committee report as people might do a task that they agreed to and then let other folks know what they did and what the result was,” said Mik.

There are other services that offer free or very inexpensive web presence including www.Americantowns.com or through www.geocities.com/patronsplace where several Grange sites can be found.

Bill Steel and Dorie Gedris both indicated that as the National Grange website is built, they will look for opportunities to link with local Grange websites.

“We already link to all the State Granges if they have a website, and it would be great if we can also link to local Granges,” said Dorie. She further offered assistance with images for local Grange websites. “If you need logos, emblem, we can send you a cd with various emblems or we can email them to you. The easiest way to get that is to send an email to me at info@nationalgrange.org as all of those emails are directed to me.”

The point was made that in this electronic age, it is important to have a presence on the internet. Even if the site doesn’t look exactly what you’d like it to look like, having some site is important. More and more people of all ages are looking to the internet to find information – and if your Grange is not there, they won’t find out about what you are doing and how they might become involved. As one participant said, “They may not choose to attend an event even if they see it on the internet. But it’s a sure bet that if they don’t even know it’s going on, they certainly will not attend!”

Bill Steel shared guidelines from National Grange, “Be sure that you indicate on your site who is in charge. Take credit for your own work – and should anyone send a complaint to us at National Grange, we’ll know who to contact to explore more.”