Idaho

• Make it readable. If you are using a free service, there will be many templates to choose from. The best approach is to make your blog look like your site, but sometimes that isn’t possible. A clean, simple template is best.
• Stay on target. Once you have decided on a service and a look, you will need to write posts. Write about whatever you feel, but make sure it connects back to you, your mission, and is of interest your constituents and your donors.
• Human interest works best. Like the newsletter tips, find individuals within your organization that can whip up a good story. A good writer can breathe life into the most mundane news story. Include success stories and quotes to inject excitement into your posts.
• Open up discussions. Turn on your comment sections so people may leave messages about your posts. This will increase involvement with your mission and stories and allow you to receive feedback about the job you are doing as well.
• Turn on a spam filter. With the surge in blogging has come the inevitable spamming. Most free services have safe guards in place, but you will still need to remain vigilant. The methods vary from having to type in a random series of characters to prove you are a human to blocking anyone wanting to post anonymously.
• Grow a thick skin. Because blogging is an open forum, you will get the occasional dissenter. The best way to approach your response is logical in nature. Their comment may be purely reactionary; however, yours needs to be calm and thoughtful. If it helps, write your emotional response somewhere away from the blog, delete it and then start fresh after you have cleared your head.
• Make it easy for your readers to read. All the free services have feeds that allow readers to subscribe and receive email updates of your blog. We like FeedBurner, which offers a variety of feed services in one spot including sending updates to all the companies that collect blog information, e-mailing those who have signed up for your blog’s feed, creating subscription forms for your site, keeping stats about visits, etc. Make sure you serve the full post to the feed readers. Give people the entire post and don’t drive them to your blog like cattle.
• Build your readership. Put you blog’s address in your signature in all e-mails. If you have a newsletter, mention your blog in it. Ask other non-profits to link to your blog from their blogs and vice versa. Find out who among your volunteers, donors, constituents, and employees have blogs and ask them to post a link. Make sure the address is on all business cards and stationary. Be creative. Once you do all that you can it’s up to word of mouth, which is powerful indeed.
• Keep your readers. Set a schedule for how often you update your blog — and stick to it. But be reasonable about your time. Make sure you have the time to update. People will read it regularly if they know there will something new there.

  Rich Tips is a free electronic newsletter published by Richard Male & Associates (RMA), an international non-profit consulting firm.

As promised, here are your two Weekly Questions!

Rules:
Post your answers on your blogsite by Tuesday, March 25 at midnight and be entered in the drawing for a fabulous prize. This week’s prize-the weekly winner can choose from one of these book titles
Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets - John P. Kretzmann or
Teaching the Commons: Place, Pride, and the Renewal of Local Schooling - Paul Theobald

The Questions:
1. A reflective question–What do you think of Horizons blogging? What do you like, what do you dislike? What can the UI Horizons Team do to help improve the blogging experience?

2. A scavenger hunt question (visit other community blogsites to find this answer) What is a PUG Mark and in which community would you find them?

Instructions:
These questions will be posted on your blog so you can post the answers on your website.

We have lots of interesting opportunities for Idaho Horizons Communities. Please check the Horizons Website!

The Study Circles Resource Center has a web article about 2 of our Horizons communities, Bonners Ferry and the Coeur d’Alene Reservation. Check out what your neighbors are up to! The website also talks about other study circles across the nation and the topics they are talking about (education, immigration, racial equality, police & community, etc.)

Dr. Rula Awwad-Rafferty’s University of Idaho Senior Interior Design students are working in several Horizons communities who have identified a community center as one of their vision/action items. The students will present their initial design concepts during a class presentation on Wednesday, November 14 from 2:30 – 5:30 at the UI campus. The students will also be sharing their initial concept designs with individual communities electronically.

The students will also host a final presentation/reception at the conclusion of the semester for all Horizons communities. The class is also researching best practices for community center design, funding and other related issues. The UI students will present their final designs and answering questions. We are still in the planning stages and will get more information to you shortly. The event is tentatively scheduled for the 2nd week in December. We’ll post more information here as soon as it’s available.