This year I’ll be serving as the Illinois Jaycees 2011 National Programs / Government Involvement State Chairmen or NPGI State Chair for short also I’ll be serving as the North Region Treasurer oh and also the Website Program Manager for the US Jaycees once again. The goal this year is promote the programs The US Jaycees and JCI have established to all of our chapters across the state. The Jaycees have a have long history of bring fourth change throughout the nation with programs like Get Out to Vote and other Government Involvement programs, Outstanding Young Farmers, Support Our Troops, Distinguish Service Award which became the Ten Outstanding Young Americans, Relay for life and just added in 2009 Riley’s Toys.
Each year members of the Illinois Jaycees support Camp New Hope through various community drives and as part of our annual fund raising campaign. Camp New Hope Respite building started construction 10 years ago, but due to the loss of State and Federal funding and the despair of our current economy, the construction remains unfinished. This building is used for the year round respite program which gives reprive to those families with members with special needs.
When the Mount Prospect Jaycees needed a update to their aging website which i first built back in 2008. 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.
You every want to plan a project or host a committee meeting virtually but don’t have a conference call number of your own or know where to start? Well your in luck thanks to a little company called Dimdim you can now host online meetings, trainings, and brainstorming sessions from the comfort of your own home for free. Dimdim is a software company that provides a web-based platform for real-time, rich-media collaboration and meetings.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
