Problem

• You want to enable members of your civic association to send a single e-mail message to all other members about meetings, schools, traffic, crime, website updates, lost pets, or couches for sale
• You want to enable members of your association to send these messages without each person having to maintain the entire e-mail list
• You want to increase participation in your association DRAMATICALLY at no cost

Solution

• Create a YahooGroups e-mail list. I will help you. It's easy, free, secure, and private.
• Obtain the e-mail address and name of at least one member to serve as moderator
• Build the list by adding e-mails and names for more members as you get them
• Tell members in meetings and newsletters to subscribe at yourlist-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
• Currently Arlington Heights, CPRO, Dominion Hills, Douglas Park, and Penrose all use YahooGroups
• Note: YahooGroups is one of many list providers. There are others.

Problem

• You have information you want your members to see, e.g., meeting notices, agendas, minutes, by-laws, newsletters, Neighborhood Conservation Plan, surveys, letters to/from the County, homes for sale, etc.
• You want a single, unified reference point for information about your civic association, to document problems, discussions, and decisions
• You want to increase participation in your association DRAMATICALLY at no cost

Solution

• Create a website. I will help you. It's not as easy, but it can be fun and free
• Obtain your notices, agenda, by-laws, newsletters, NC plan, letters, etc., in digital form
• Convert them to HTML and upload them to the website
• Advertise your website in your newsletter, link other websites to yours, and add it to the County's page.

NOTE:

• Be careful what you wish for. Arlington Heights's e-mail list carries 20 messages a week, and our website has grown to 12 megabytes.

Notes

Added by Randy Swart, CivFed Webmaster

Bear in mind that the Web site design is secondary. Your first concern should be finding a Webmaster who is willing to keep your site up to date. If somebody goes looking for the minutes of your last meeting and finds that the most recent minutes are from last year, your site is lost. If you ask in your newsletter for a volunteer you will be very likely to find one. Then you have to remember to send things to be posted to the Webmaster -- newsletters, minutes, meeting agendas, etc. It is very frustrating for the Webmaster to have to send an email asking for every document.

As far as design goes, the time-honored way of creating a neighborhood Web site is to look over the ones already up and steal one! You can easily customize yours by changing the colors and other options to avoid just duplicating, then replace the text with your own original text and voila! you have a site. For ideas, see the CivFed links page and check out what's up. Imitation is the sincerest form of Web flattery, but make sure the Webmaster for the site you are copying from is cool with the idea. Even if you already have a site and a design, you will find unique features among the various neighborhoods to enhance your site.

There are many Web page creation programs now, including Microsoft FrontPage, that allow non-professionals to do some really creative things. This site has ten downloadable Web page editors. Most of them have Web templates you can just fill in to get up and running quickly.

Web hosting is another area where the experience of other neighborhoods can help. There are some free Web hosting services, easy to find with a Google search like this one. Or you can take a look at some of the Arlington sites to see which ones are using what service. We would mention more of them, but they tend to go out of business or stop taking new clients, and our list would not be current. That argues for registering your own domain name, so that when you change providers the links will all still work.

Barcroft has had very good experience with Pair Networks. Their accounts start at $6 per month. Barcroft has a page up about their link to the Internet.

This page was last revised on: April 11, 2006.