Wednesday, April 18, 2007

The Chula Vista Genealogy Cafe is Open!

I posted about two weeks ago asking for opinions about the viability of using a blog to communicate to the members of a genealogy society. We received two comments about the issue - one said that they were going to think about for their society, and the other said that, as a younger genealogist, they tend to read the Internet rather than a paper newsletter. I thank my two anonymous commenters!

After a little thought and discussion over lunch, the Chula Vista Genealogical Society launched The Chula Vista Genealogy Cafe (at http://CVGenCafe.blogspot.com/), where members can come in and read about their society activities, contribute content, ask questions, or comment on the posts of others.

It is important to note that the Genealogy Cafe blog does not replace the static web site (with an online newsletter) and the paper newsletter. We will continue to communicate with our members via email also, since some of them don't use the Internet except for email.

Our whole purpose in creating the Genealogy Cafe is to be able to improve the research knowledge and skills of our members. We will leave it open to non-members so that we can attract new members to the society and help, in some small way, all genealogy researchers. There is some hand-holding required to introduce the blog to our members - just getting them to click on an email link is a challenge sometimes!

What do you think? What else can we offer our members in terms of communication and services? How much communication and online service is too much? We are open to suggestions and welcome your constructive comments.

2 comments:

Becky Wiseman said...

Great idea Randy! Looks like the CVGenCafe is off to a good start. I'll be watching your project to see how it goes. I mentioned to my society board members about the society setting up a blog but none of the five of them knew what a blog was even though I'd written about blogging in our society newsletter a little over a year ago!

I was also interested in the results of your member survey. I'd venture a guess to say that the CVGS members are much more computer literate than my local society members.

Anonymous said...

I agree - It's a great idea! Think we'll be talking about it at our society meeting too.