IMC Publicity Officer’s Handbook 2021 ( Updated November 2021 John Duignan )

Important message on role :

It is essential that all incoming officers of the club to review and ensure they understand the General Data Protection Regulation Guidelines ( GDPR ) on taking up their role.

The IMC Data GDPR Guidelines are to be found in : About\Documents\Data Privacy Policy.

Responsibilities

The IMC Club Constitution states:

“The Publicity Officer, whose duties shall be to operate, maintain and promote any publications and websites operated by the Club, keep members informed about the services and facilities and benefits available to them, deal with general promotional publicity relating to the Club, and as otherwise specified in this Constitution.”

IMC Constitution

Summarising those responsibilities in turn:

Publications

Here “publications” generally means the Club Newsletter. This is currently published bi-annually as material becomes available (it has been published more frequently in the past, it really comes down to what is available plus, as the web site has grown splitting content between the website & the newsletter).

Recently the Publicity Officer has also taken the role of updating the Club stationery.

Websites

The interpretation of “websites” is taken to mean both the IMC website and the IMC Facebook page, although, of recent years, the Facebook page has been maintained more by the Webmaster and, more recently still, the Membership Officer. Maintaining these mediums also entails moderation.

Informing Members

Occasionally the Publicity Officer receives details of services, event, benefits, etc which may be of use to the membership and these should be posted on the forum whilst ensure they do not conflict with the Club’s Guidelines for Online Content (see Appendix A).

Promotion

If required, the Publicity Officer should produced posters to promote various events such as the Christmas Talk, charity fund raising events and, of course, the New Members Programme.

Occasionally events are publicised in the press. Climbing is under the remit of Sports Editors, so try and contact them if needed. The free papers have published for us in the past, they are perhaps more open to free content.

The Newsletter

This takes most of your time as Publicity Officer, between chasing down articles and producing the final PDF.

Obtaining Content for Newsletter

Chase members . There are many very competent writes in the Club :

• Keep note of members who go away of IMC Meets, once they return chase them down for photographs and possible trip reports. Be open to having multiple contributors and editing an article down yourself.
• Also make note of members who go away on private trips, and likewise pester them for photographs and trip reports.
• For a Summer edition, try and get a few New Members to give their “Perspectives” – generally the New Members are keen to give something back and it’s nice for those members who have mentored them during the spring to see the fruits of their efforts.
• Get photographs of key club events. Recently the newsletter has tried to devote the centre 4 pages to a more photo-oriented feature. It’s also a good space filler.
• Be aware that people will promise you things and repeatedly let you down – it is better to expect this and be pleasantly surprised if they deliver 🙂
• Don’t be afraid to edit, even severely, content that you get. Not everyone can write, even if they think they can. As well as grammar & spelling, check details & names and add maps if you feel it helps.
• Likewise, if people send you bad quality photos, check if they are the original images (cameras embed EXIF information in an image file which includes the name of the camera and image resolution – if it isn’t there then it’s probably a non-original compressed image). If you suspect they are not original quality images, get back to the sender and check. Often people will upload photos to Facebook and then send you on the massively compressed Facebook images; sometimes the less technically able will send you thumbnail images rather than the real image – don’t be afraid to go back and ask.
• Always ask for photos to be sent as separate files. Often people will embed photos in their documents and they are invariably compressed images.
• As with the text, feel free to edit photos by re-cropping and ‘Photoshopping’ as you desire – a printed photo can always stand a bit of extra colour saturation together with tweaks to shadows & highlights if this is something you are comfortable doing.
• If all you have are fairly lousy quality images then consider making a blog post instead – you can get away with poorer quality images on the web that look far worse in print.
• Keep a record of who sent you what photos, so that you can credit them later.
• Don’t be afraid to ask non-members for content, if they are external trainers that we use then they might welcome the publicity and may even have a ‘standard’ article ready to go.
• In the past various forms of interaction have been attempted via the newsletter such as crosswords, or requests for feedback, top ten lists, etc.

As you get used to the role you will realise who the better writers are and who takes good photographs.

Producing & Printing The Newsletter

Declan Craig (ex IMC President) handled our printing needs and also reviewed the formatting for the Newsletter in 2021. Contact him again in the new season to see if he can still provide this service , which he does at a greatly reduced rate,

As of 2015 the Publicity Officer started formatting the PDF for the Newsletter themselves.

Scribus if the software used (https://www.scribus.net/) a free desktop publishing package available for most operating systems. There are templates for the current newsletter styling on the Publicity DropBox account (login publicity@irishmountaineeringclub.org, pass: luggala) together with all the stock images & other collateral used.

By all means, feel free to redesign any aspect of the newsletter.

When formatting the newsletter, remember it must be a multiple of 4 pages for it to print! Try and save good images to the front & back covers (inside as well as outside) as these will be printed on higher grade gloss paper. As mentioned above, try to credit each photographer – which will hopefully encourage future contributions.

Printers

As mentioned above, at time of writing we have unfortunately just lost our long standing printer. 4 other sources were asked for quotes with the following results (none have been used yet):

• Declan Craig 086 4027652 first contact

• Excel Print (Eamonn excelprintnavan@eircom.net)
  • Contacts Booklet = €260 (B&W inside) for 90 copies
  • Newsletter = €635 for 150 copies
• Arrow Print (Dan Mulcahy dan.mulcahy@arrowprint.ie) (prices include delivery)
  • Contacts Booklet = €295 (B&W inside) for 90 copies
  • Newsletter = €550 for 150 copies
• Reads (Niall Mescall niall@reads.ie)
  • Replied but did not manage to give us a quote
• Zest Creative
  • Did not reply (although had 3 years back)

If we play it right we can get VAT @ 0% for once yearly publication, otherwise 9%

Distribution

The original PDF from Scribus will be large, use a PDF compactor such as (https://smallpdf.com/compress-pdf) to produce a lightweight version that can be uploaded to the IMC Website.

A link to this version should then be mailed out to all digital edition subscribers as soon as available.

You will need to extract from GroupSpaces who get digital & who gets paper versions. For the latter, you can do a mail merge to produce address labels, etc. All members got a hard copy in 2021.

Document Templates

The IMC Document Templates are maintained on the Committee DropBox account under the “Document Templates” folder. The IMC website contains a link to this folder on the “Committee | Committee Documents” page. We maintain Word & OpenDocument (LibreOffice, etc) format versions of these templates.

At the start of every IMC year these will need updating with the new Secretary’s name & address in the header of all documents.

The IMC Website

The content of the IMC website is the Publicity Officer’s responsibility but the production of that content is everyone responsibility, particularly the Committee.

Our website is written using WordPress and it’s administration and development is generally shared between the Webmaster & the Publicity Officer.

At the start of any new Committee year, the Publicity Officer should inform the Committee of the Committee specific pages, with particular reference to the Committee FAQ: https://www.irishmountaineeringclub.org/committee-faqs/

Individual Committee members should be encouraged to read sections of the website pertaining to their roles and be sure they agree with the content.

Website Development

A brief history: Note the below may need updating by the WebMaster

The website moved to WordPress in 2014. This was the partial implementation of a number of long term goals, the primary focus of this first WordPress version was to make it look more modern & visually appealing.

In addition, there was a desire to allow member details to be available online (previously these were maintained on a master spreadsheet that was passed around). This was solved by the introduction of GroupSpaces, although this too was regarded as an interim solution as details in GroupSpaces were not linked to similar details in WordPress leading to repetition, inconsistency and all forms of general annoyance.

The initial WordPress site had a number of limitations in terms of usability, maintainability & security. As such a new hosting/maintenance deal was struck by the Webmaster in 2017 which resulted in a simplified but more secure & futureproof website.

The future:

The challenge for future committees is to now build on that and produce a better website, including:

• Improving the overall look & feel
• Integrating a membership database to replace GroupSpaces (some members have objected to having their details held by a third-party (GroupSpaces) and asked to be removed which, obviously, increases administrative overhead)
• Improving the most commonly used feature (the forum) so that it can successfully compete with other social media channels.

The IMC Facebook Page

Content on our Facebook page is maintained by the whole Committee although the Publicity Officer has ultimate responsibility. Committee Ian Lawler veryy kindly looked after this in 2021, regularly posting pictures of Meets

Other Social Media

In addition to our WordPress website & Facebook page, the IMC also has a Twitter account and a WhatsApp account.

The Twitter account is not a primary source of communication, its use tends to be in bursts although it has around 240 followers in 2020. Whether it is used depends very much on the committee of the time.

The WhatsApp account enjoys regular use by many of the members. There is also a WhatsApp group for “IMC Pensioners “. The Publicity Officer/ Membership Officer and Web Manager  are joint moderators of the site ; Consideration should be given to have a female member as a moderator for  gender balance. The Social Media guidelines are in the appendix below .

All members using Social Media are bound to keep content civil.

Exclusivity of Social Media

The Publicity Officer should be aware that there are primary & secondary channels of communication.

All official Club communication should be conducted via the IMC website, either via Forums or Events pages and by emails to the membership (currently sent via GroupSpaces).

All other channels (Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, WhateverElseComesNext) are not inclusive and should regarded as secondary means of communication that will only reach a subset of the membership.

The challenge for the Publicity Officer, Webmaster and, indeed, entire Committee is to make the website appealing enough to use that it successfully competes with these secondary channels (although, obviously, they will always be there in one form or another).

Moderating Online Content

Any IMC-related content needs moderation. This has especially been an issue in the past on the forum.

Moderating the content is the remit of the Publicity Officer & Webmaster although the entire Committee should be vigilant for abusers. Moderation can be a tricky business, balancing freedom of speech against offence. If there’s doubt about whether something should be moderated, get a Committee consensus first.

Any offensive or inappropriate posts should be removed, in line with the Club’s Guidelines for Online Content (see Appendix A). Depending on the nature of the post it is often best to offer the original poster the opportunity to remove or reword content before stepping in and doing so oneself.

Appendix A – Guidelines For Online Content

This section is from Harry Magee : It discussed by the 2017 Committee but no final guidelines were produced, the following draft, specifically drawn up for our Facebook page but applicable to all online content, was as far as things got:

Content should feature IMC members or should be of interest to a significant portion of members.

• No posting content related to a business you have a financial interest in (similar to Constitution 9.2.5. “fees, remuneration or other benefit in money or money’s worth to any company of which an Officer may be a member holding not more than one hundredth part of the issued capital of such company.”)
• An Editor will need to:
  • post regularly, ideally at least 1x per month. No point having someone listed as Editor if they are not active.
  • actively interact with other Editors’ posts.
  • have a good judgement when to comment on behalf of IMC (ideally only on their own IMC FB post) and as individual.
• Content should:
  • feature IMC members taking part in the IMC events and/or their adventures. Note: Editor should not promote himself/herself and his/her climbing partner only.
  • Feature climbing related news, updates, blogs, interviews, videos, pictures. When re-posting, Editor needs to post a meaningful insight, explaining why re-posting or taking a few important sentences to make a headline, not just sharing someone else’s post on the IMC FB page without any comment.
  • encourage Club members and FB followers to engage and interact as much as possible. When interaction on their post achieved, comment and like on behalf of IMC where applicable.
  • have as many names and details as possible – so followers can see real people behind the Club / FB page and can get some insights and inspiration rather than having nice photos standing on its own.
  • always be in the Club’s interest at first place, not for Editor’s own gain.
  • never promote any business or be linked with any business, unless approved by Committee.
  • maintain credibility, be professional, authentic, truthful, respectful, non-judgmental, avoid real or apparel conflicts and disputes.
• Before posting and/or scheduling a post, Editor needs to check that:
  • it doesn’t interfere with any IMC Event. Promoting IMC Events and activities should be always the top priority.
  • the post doesn’t clash with any other scheduled post, avoiding to post on the same day as someone else.
  • consider the timing of the post to gain maximum attention.

Appendix B – Tracking Submissions

Harry Magee found a table like this useful for tracking who had promised articles, which ones had been received, if useful photos had been received too and finally whether the article had been added to the newsletter. This together with a word count gives you an idea of when you have enough for a newsletter.

Typically a good size newsletter will be around 12000 words, a lightweight one around 8000.

Sample Newletter Tracking Table: Summer 2016

Rcvd	In	Author	Title	Words	Pics
				8840
			Editor’s Summary
			Contents	–
		Dave Madden	Mixed Memories of Arctic Senja	1020	Y
		Peter Thompson	IMC Connemara – Carrot Ridge	880	Y
		Ken Doyle	IMC Connemara – Glencoaghan Horseshoe	1300	Y
			New Member’s Glendo Centre Photo Spread		Y
		Ambrose	El Chorro	1390	Y
		Michela & Teresa	Lake District Trip	1160	Y
		Anna Weiser	New Member Perspectives	460	Y
		Andy Minshull	New Member Perspectives	1030	Y
		Marie McCarthy	Mont Blanc	1600	Y
			Promote Dermot Somers’ Talk