IRONBRIDGE AND SEVERN GORGE LIONS
AGM 12 APRIL 2018
WEBSITE, SOCIAL MEDIA AND IT SUPPORT
An attractive web site plus an active social media presence is now an absolute requirement for any community organisation and over the past few years we have put considerable effort into building and maintaining a new web site – www.ironbridgelions.org – and to communicating through our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ironlions/. We also publish details of our activities through local community sites such as the Ironbridge Community Facebook site. That effort has has had a major impact on our public profile particularly when linked to activities such as our prostate testing programme.
As a communication medium, Facebook has the great advantage that posts find their own audience – posts will appear automatically in the newsfeed of those who have opted to link to our page and if they choose to share a post it can reach an audience of many thousands with no effort on our part. Website posts have no such automatic audience and will remain unread unless people actively search for them. On the other hand, Facebook’s single column structure makes it much less effective than a web site as a reference point for information as new posts are rapidly pushed down the column and out of site by subsequent posts. Our strategy therefore is to publish short news items on current activities on our Facebook page with a link to more detail on our web site.
One small, but quite significant, extension to our IT support during the year was represented by the fact that tickets for our concert in January were offered for sale online through a ticketing agency for the first time. Unsurprisingly, the take-up was limited but Shelley Reid did create a small stir of surprise when she became the first person to gain entrance to one of our events by presenting her mobile phone.
In the coming year we will continue to build the and maintain the web site and to extend the reach of our Facebook page. But the major challenge over the next few months will be created by the new EU data protection regulations – known as GDPR – which imposes significant responsivities on organisations holding and using personal data combined with much greater penalties for those who fail to live up to those responsibilities. Among other things this means that we will need to obtain specific consents from each member and friend in respect of activities associated with their personal data – including:
- Consent to send communications on matters associated with the club
- Consent to include them in an online and/or physical directory, coupled with agreement on the data items to be included in those directories
- Consent to include them in google groups which enable other members and friends to communicate with them at will.
The obligations which the GDPR impose relating to the security of the personal data that we hold (both electronically and physically) will also make it necessary to publish a data policy and to upgrade the existing password protection system for the directory.
Colin Thompson
2 April 2018
Recent Comments