JCI

What are you doing? that’s a question that you are probably asked dozens of time a day. How many of you use the Facebook status function each day? How many of you use it more than once each day? Well, this year the North Region Jaycees are trying something new and we will be using a free service named Twitter to communicate all kinds of one line answers, event postings, random thoughts, and newsflashes about articles recently added to the Region’s website www.northregionjaycees.com. How can you and your chapter use Twitter? Twitter has many uses such as sending out help requests to all your members while you are already on site project day via a single text message from your cell phone. It could also be used for sending updates to your chapter website and my favorite- keeping members up-to-date with upcoming events. Once they read how much fun you are having, they may want to attend the next time-especially state and national conventions. Twitter’s popularity has exploded over the last year thanks in part to the 2008 Presidential race. Both parties used Twitter to communicate with hundreds of thousands of supporters. Last year, Dell showed that Twitter can be used as a source of income when they generated over a million dollars in sales from the service by posting items for sale.

Each year being in the Jaycees brings something exciting to do and well 2010 is no different. This year in addition to serving on my state’s board and the US Jaycees board I’ve decided to create my own personal challenge for myself. That is to be come a tenth degree Jaycee in the course of the year. The degree program is designed to build great leaders. It starts off at with the basics getting a person socially involved to develop the social and networking skills and then progress over time to the point of where the person is heading up committees, chapter, districts, and states. Most of the things identified in the degrees program I’ve done of the last three years but where I come from we didn’t participate in the degree program and we produce great leaders still.

The next online training will be on Monday the 15th. We will be learning about how to make on online survey and taking a look at three products in the market all of which are free. We will also learn how to build a survey using the Google Docs platform. Training is open to the first 50 people with 33 seats allocated to the state staff. Sign up for the training using the widget on the right side.	http://widgets.clearspring.com/o/499d781e7a2ff8ce/4b965c363e647208/49a40d8b9c8624f5/3b09127f/-cpid/54f914fa14e9687d/showRecording/false/showTimer/false/showTranscript/false/showRegistration/false

When the Hoffman Estates Jaycees needed a update to their aging website. I worked with the chapter executive board to bring a fresh new look to their website. For this site it required moving over all the current chapter contain as well as introducing some new features. I choose WordPress as the platform to host their site because two of their board members were familiar with it and training the rest of the board wouldn’t be a problem. The Hoffman Estates Jaycees is a leadership development and networking group for adults between the age of 18 and 40 in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. Check out the groups website at http://www.hoffmanestatesjaycees.org

Integrating into social networks is just important as being on them in the past the US Jaycees website hasn’t made reference to our involvement with the online social networks. Today I introduced a new module called stalker which allows us to promote our social network pages on our homepage as well as I wrote a custom module for displaying the organizations Facebook fan page.

Today I’ll begin working the US Jaycees Site. My first task is to perform a Full DB backup just incase something goes wrong. This was going well until I ran into my first problem i was unable to access the db server which is no big deal since i could get into the php admin panel. It’s been so long since I’ve had to perform a manual backup in MYSQL. But that what they make Google for right? After getting the backup completed and burned to a CD i moved on to updated the directory and posting some new documents. While doing this I came up with a interesting idea to keep track of my work though out the year. I’m using Google docs and created a form using the form feature to track my work which is pictured below. I really haven’t put much though into changing the site design and layout. I personally like it so lets see what people ask me to do.