As a committee member, you get a few more toys to play with on this site than the average club member. This page is to help you become familiar with them – or, at least, their whereabouts.
EMail:
Many committee members have their own ‘club’ email addresses, in the form of: “YourPosition@cantabsrowing.org.uk”. These addresses re-direct to your existing email address. As an example, let’s say our secretary has a gmail address. Mail addressed to ‘secretary@cantabsrowing.org.uk’ will arrive in her/his gmail inbox along with the rest of her/his mail. This system prevents published addresses going ‘stale’ and means that we don’t need to alter documents, records etc as a club after each AGM.
On the site itself:
Firstly, you get access to the ‘Committee Area’ link on the main menu (that’s the area you’re in now – non-committee members can’t see this). Access allows you to use the club’s mass-mailer to contact all or some groups of the membership and to access a full list of all members with contact details. If you are the Equipment Officer you get access to your own area, designed in the hope that it will assist you with at least some of your day-to-day tasks. There is also a separate area within the message boards reserved for the use of committee members – no-one else can see this.
Secondly, you may have noticed a black bar running along the top of the site and containing the text ‘Cantabrigian Rowing Club’ at left and your own name at right. Click on the former and you will have access to a special admin area. From here, you can edit some of the content displayed on the site and even add your own. You can add events to our calendar. If you are a squad leader, you can add to or edit your own squad’s page – this is the page prospective new members will naturally be drawn to, so it makes sense for you to keep it readable and relevant. There are various other facilities, most of which I hope will be self-explanatory. If they’re not, or if you can’t find a way of doing whatever it is you want to do, please ask.
Using the Club Mailer:
We are currently having a LOT of emails treated as spam by some email suppliers, some of which completely block their delivery. Please do not use the Club Mailer without checking with the Club Secretary first, as it may be possible to combine messages or reach your target audience by another route, e.g. ClubHub, by emailing Crew Reps, or using the Members Facebook group. However, if you really need to use the club mailer in some unusual circumstance, you can access it by clicking here.
[The Club Mailer is mostly used for sending emails to all current club members. To send an email to current members, select Club Mailer from the Committee menu and then click on the “Send Group Message »” link. Select the intended Recipients, which will mostly be “Role – Active_Members” and “Role – Committee“, using the Ctrl key to allow you to select both groups at once*. If you miss out the “Role – Committee” group, then your fellow committee members will not see your email, which is generally not helpful. The rest should be fairly self-explanatory, but please ask if you have any questions/problems.
(* Note from Gill: selecting multiple groups seems to reduce chances of delivery; I get better results by sending to one group, then selecting the second group and sending to them; the text of the email remains in the editing pane, so this is easy to do). ]
White-listing Club Email:
Occasionally, your email client or ISP may decide that messages from the Club Mailer to you are ‘spam’ or ‘junk’ and might prevent them from reaching you. To prevent this, or stop it happening if you suspect it, you can usually white-list the sender’s email address – only other committee members are likely to use this means of contact, so white-listing the entire domain ‘cantabsrowing.org.uk’ is a useful start. The means by which you do this varies depending on what software you use for your email and your provider. A list of commonly-used programs, with instructions on how to white-list, can be found here. If you use the webmail version offered by Cantab.net, please take a look at this. If none of this helps, or your system isn’t covered, please get in touch.