meeting prep
Two weeks before: send announcement email and reset the “members” spreadsheet (RSVP count) for the new meeting.
Two weeks before: add “meeting announcement” page to web site.
Two weeks before: confirm with club and select menu. (I let them decide for me with a rotation between chicken/beef/seafood. YMMV.)
One week before: send reminder announcement to those who have not responded.
Monday before meeting: send headcount to the club.
Monday before meeting: contact speaker to confirm; coordinate digital presentation if any
Thursday of meeting: arrive early to handle the day’s crisis, e.g., TV and digital presentation don’t work, etc.
After the meeting: send thank-you email to speaker.
After the meeting: copy the “members” spreadsheet to an archive sheet to capture the RSVP list for the meeting;
Monday after the meeting: get the CCC invoice and send check to Bill Farr.
meeting agenda
brief speaker on the agenda whenever convenient
before meeting: check AV setup, test presentation, check batteries
before meeting: count seats that have been setup
12:05 move members to seats
12:35 check AV setup again
12:40 take the floor: announce future speakers; remember to pay your dues; introduce each guest by associated member; recognize each new member for (very) brief self-intro; introduce the speaker (typically by the associated member)
1:25 “time for one more question”; do not let speaker go beyond 1:30 or no one will come to the next meeting
dues for 2022-2023
The web site is now setup for that amount for $225 dues but it’s easy to change.
The web site provides instructions for paying by check. If you devise some more modern method, that’s a good thing.
guest policy
Amazingly, in the 2021-2022 season, we averaged about five guests per meeting. Not all bad: guests help fill up the room and sometimes become new members–see “membership policy”.
Generally, a member may bring a guest who is a potential member; some members will ask permission first (“we got room?”) and some will just announce that they are bringing a guest; it all seems to work despite occasional abuses. I may on occasion tell the member “RSVPs are running high so wait a week and I’ll let you know”.
When RSVPs are running thin, I usually encourage about 5-10 members to bring a guest, not necessarily a new member. I select members that (a) have paid dues, (b) have long-time membership, (c) don’t usually bring guests, and/or (d) have gotten good speakers for us. If you make eight such requests, you will get about two guests.
When RSVPs are running thin, I have also invited non-members that relate to the speaker, e.g., when former GaState/GaTech/Alabama football coach Bill Curry was our speaker, out-of-the-blue I invited Charlie Cobb the GaState AD and he came. (Yes, I was careful to check that Cobb was not the AD that fired Curry.)
membership policy
New members must be approved by the executive committee.
to become a member
- Pay dues. See the dues page on the web site for instructions.
- Provide what info you want for your entry on the membership listing. See the membership page for examples. The password for that page is “hartsfield”. Name and email are the only required items.
- Email me a headshot picture or a link to a picture.
- At the next meeting you attend, you will be called upon for a brief introduction.
- And, until we get you on the mailing list, check the web site for meeting announcements.
member spreadsheet operation
The spreadsheet for managing RSVPs is at google.com/sheets, the philip.a.l.miller@gmail.com account. The main sheet “members” has the profile info, an RSVP checkbox, a seat count, and notes for each member.
After a meeting, I copy the members sheet to another sheet named according to the meeting, e.g., “November”. At the end of the season, I download the full spreadsheet and save it under the meeting season. The archive gives me a record of who attended each meeting.
There’s a custom menu entry to reset the members sheet for the next meeting. This entry clears all of the RSVP, seat counts, and meeting notes.
The “new member” checkbox on the main sheet is used by the script that produces the membership list. The list highlights new members at the top and then repeats the new members alphabetically in the full list. I periodically clear the “new member” checkbox after several meetings.
The “meeting” sheet shows the current seat count and other data for cut/paste into emails. When you select the custom menu entry for “Show All Email Addresses” on the main sheet, those addresses show up on the meeting sheet for cut/paste into a mailing. There’s also the “Show Non-Responsive Email Addresses”, which produces the emails for members who have not yet responded. The second meeting announcement (the “reminder” announcement) typically goes to the non-responders.
There’s a sheet named “payments”, which is the ledger for dues. When a check is received, I mark “dues paid” on the main sheet and then add an entry to the payments sheet. The “dues paid” column shows on the membership list as “active 2022-2023”, a subtle way to distinguish the dues payers from the deadbeats and from the inactive members.
web site maintenance
For each meeting, I create a post with the category “meeting announcements”, a cut/paste from the announcement email. This gives us a record of each speaker, an important archive when attracting a new speaker.
To update the membership list, I download the main spreadsheet as a csv from google.com/sheets and run a script make.sh. The script produces the html from the csv and uploads the html as the membership page to the web site.