Dues increase – Last chance to renew your membership or recruit a new member before dues increases on April 1st.
Tag line – Your opinion counts. We need a short but descriptive tag line to describe DACS that will be used consistently with our newsletter, website, social media, email, and all printed material. I like and have been using “From mobile to desktop, we inform, enlighten, and educate”. Do you agree or do you think we should use something else? Please let us know at http://dacs.org/feedback/.
Our newest Board member – Tom Zarecki was unanimously elected at our February 4th Board meeting to fill the vacancy left by Bruce Preston. Tom is an adjunct Marketing professor at WestConn, very active in social media and broadcasting. He has been a member for less than a year but has become very active with DACS. We are looking for his fresh ideas that will reinvigorate DACS now and into the future.
Marketing 315 – Lisa Leifels and I participated in an Advertising and Social Media class (MKT 315) at Western Connecticut University, with Tom Zarecki. Tom set this up as an exercise for the entire class of 28 students, to serve as an Ad agency for DACS and two other non-profit organizations. Lisa and I are very excited at the reception we got and the excellent questions the students asked. We are looking forward to follow-up meetings in a few weeks and their recommendations near the end of the semester.
Membership committee – Richard Corzo recently spent an entire weekend completing the CiviCRM switchover from Drupal to WordPress. CiviCRM is the platform on which the membership committee maintains our membership base, mailing list, and direct mailings. “Civi” will supercede the Access database that has been maintained by Charlie Bovaird for more than 20 years and will be used now as a backup and for membership analysis. WordPress is the platform used for our website. We will soon be ready to look into more fully integrating the two.
Upcoming Events – Bring a friend to our future meetings. Learn how to supplement your income by starting an online business (March 3rd), make more effective use of social media (April 7th), and get updated about the Future of Healthcare and the Internet. What topics would you like to know more about? Don’t forget our new meeting time is 7:30pm and starts with our main presentation. Don’t be late.
25th anniversary – we need more of you to work with Cathy Quaranta to plan and make this yearlong celebration a success. This will create a much broader awareness of DACS as we participate in new activities, and create collectables of interest to DACS members and the general public. Talk about your ideas with her at the check-in table at our next general meeting or let her know by email.
Small Business Workshops – We are co-sponsoring a series of four Small Business Workshops with SCORE. The topics are: “Your Marketing Tool Kit”, “Keys to a Great Website”, “SEO Deep Dive”, and “Branding”. These are being hosted by the Danbury Library and started on February 10th. Judging from the attendance of DACS members at the first workshop, it is apparent that many of you are interested in starting or running a small business more effectively, so these free workshops and others like them should be of particular interest to many of you. It is not too late to register for the remaining workshops. Find more on our website at http://dacs.org/small-business-workshop-series/.
From mobile to desktop, we inform, enlighten, and educate
Dick Gingras, President