Chatelaines and the Internet
The Internet has brought new opportunities and styles of recruiting that previously we did not have available. It has allowed our target audience to multiply indefinitely and for the information we want to pass on and for all pertinent information to be stored in one place. The officer traid of Chatelaine, Web minister, and Media Representative are charged with keeping a consistent public image on the web and in person for SCA, Inc., our Kingdoms, and our local groups.
Philosophy behind "Cyber-Chatelaining":
Just because we can communicate more expediently and efficiently over the Internet, does not mean we should slack off on our foundations of communication. Communication is very important to our job, because we are trying to convey a very personal experience to a person to whom this experience may be totally foreign. We cannot overlook the importance of grammar, spelling, and descriptive language in our work. We cannot rely on our jargon to convey an idea, we need to be able to describe what we do. Take for instance our SCA term "boffer tourney" that we use to describe youth fighting. Boffer may denote a sexual connotation to some individuals who are not familiar with SCA culture. The word mundane may be offensive. Calling children "halflings" is just baffling to non-members. Instead, it may be best to use words like "foam weapon tournament" when interacting with the "modern world" and "youth".
Not only to do we want to be descriptive in our language choices and have everything written well and spelled well, we should also appear professional and polite in our work. By learning a bit of Internet Etiquette we can better serve our office. Here is a short article about the do's and don'ts of email etiquette--PDF Format.
We also need to convey the limits of our personal boundaries and office boundaries to the public, so that we appear consistant, dedicated, and truthful in our interactions. Chatelaines are not newcomer babysitters, we should not be personal interventionists, nor therapists. We are the people who help newcomers transition into the SCA and local group by offereing specific services, such as classes, group meetings or meet and greets, social activities, information packets, and maintaining a Gold Key. We are not necessarily the newcomer's new best friend. Be up front about how your office works, on your website try to approximate your response time, or where you will next to be able to speak to newcomers. List your resources, so newcomers can get an idea of the scope of your office and know what they can ask you for. This is not to say we should not be friendly and polite to newcomers, of course we should, everyone should, not just the Chatelaine office holder. In my mind, what it comes down to, is that not one person can speak to every single newcomer, send out all the follow-ups, run all the meetings, maintain all the Gold Key, update the website, etc..and so forth. Society calls for every member to be a chatelaine, and the officer holder is the coordinator and cheerleader behind a group's effort in chatelaining.
In part for professionalism and, in part, for safety meeting newcomers, especially if first contact was made over the internet should be done in public places and perferabley within a small group setting. Not all newcomers would be comfortable meeting a new group of people in someone's home or yard, nor should we go over to a newcomer's house, if we do not know them. We do not need a newcomer's life story or all their personal information in order to our job. Newcomer's shoud be encouraged to only give what personal information they feel comfortable providing, and vice versa. This is in part why having a group website is important. The group website allows the group to have a face and voice, that newcomers can easily refer to, so that you do not have to give out personal information to sound more reputable.
The main page of your group's website should be geared more toward the general public than the SCA member. The first page should tell a newcomer where your group is, who is charge, what they can click on for more newcomer information, and should not have much jargon on it. This first page is the first impression your group will have on the general public and some newcomers, it should be inviting, clean, well written, easy to navigate, and professional. Always work with your local or regional web minister, when possible to help improve the quality of your group's first impression. Email address should be aliased (like chatelaine@AEthelmearc.org, which actually sends email to the Kingdom Chatelaine perferred email program or service. Your Kingdom Web Minister might be able to help you get this servcie.) or listed as text (gilamere at yahoo dot com) to avoid officer's email boxes being innudated by bots (spammers who use a program to steal email addresses from websites, in order to send them ads, viruses, etc...). Having a Chatelaine's page or site is an extra bonus for your group and office, here you can list all your activities, handouts, Gold Key inventories, meeting times and place (even better on an online calender), newcomer orientated links and so forth, making your job a little easier.
Never be nervous about asking our web team to take a look at your site. Our only focus is making sure your site is as great as possible!
So, now that have all the techincalities out the way, for most part, on to the fun stuff:
Populace suggested Internet tools:
Bravenet: This site offers free tools for the webmaster. They are easy to create, most are only copy and past codes for you website or page. To administer you bravenet tools, you log into bravenet and use their control panel. All of their free tools have advertisements, so use a disclaimer on your tool page to mention that you might approve or endorse the ads, and they are controlled by bravenet and not you. They offer free: epostcards, forums, guestbooks, hit counters, photo albums, blogs, polls/quizzes, online calenders, mailing lists, search bars for your site, and much more.
Statcounter: This is an excellant free service that allows you construct a hit/unique counter they way you want it and records all data, which is then displayed in graphs and number counts (daily, monthly, quarterly, yearly) for easy data collections and understanding. It can tell you which pages are most popular, what the IP address is of people looking at your site, allows you to block IP addresses, tells you where people came from when they found your site, what keywords they used to search your page out and much more! This is a very powerful tool!
Dead Link Finder: This is a great, free tool to keep your site optimized and fresh. Just type your URL into the tool and it looks through all the links on your site. It then tells you if there are any problems with your links and where those problems are!
This article is based on Fru Ellisif and Lady Rowan's "Cyber Chatelaine" class and article. It was created on 5/07, AS XLII
Special thanks to Lord Eirik for his wonderful input and direction, and Lady Dawn De La Lune and Jay for their input and support. Thank you to Stephanus, Ian, and Yulia for their patience with their parents while they undertook this the cyber chatelaine project.
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