Southern California Jamboree in Burbank - day 1

And I am off and running for the day displaying my pride in Root Cellar .............

This morning was a great time with lots of great information and speakers......... I attended all the Society based sessions and it was well worth it the time and effort.

Cath Madden Trindle with Projects. (and at 8am who cares) but it was good. Cath goes by the 5 P's - Projects, Planning, Participation, Production and Publication.
Projects and  Partners- partner with someone that can help you  with your goals and mission. Example would be Ancestry.com to help digitize a set of special records. Partner with other society's.... example would be for a larger confernece split the efforts, and volunteers -- Partment with another society that is doing a very lasrge project and offer to be responsible for a part of it.. example would be volunteering to be responsible for Sacramento County on the CSGA Wiki project. Any project and partnering needs to have the buy in of the membership otherwise the same people will be doing all the work and it will not be fun. Getting more involved with your community. Enhancing cemetery tours, several memebers writing a regular column for the local newspaper, Publize what you are doing, let the public know, you don't want to be duplicating something already done or being done. Publizing it might get you more volunteers which might mean more members.Consider a blog, a wiki, flickr, facebook, twitter.

Schelly Talalay Dardashti with Publicity is the Society's friend (is that right Denise?) Social Media is key and really be very helpful - facebook, twitter, genealogy networking, websites. We are all losing members because of age factor, so we need to rethink who our audience will be.  Must have a  good website witth complete information. Where you are located, the state, the city,  the street address of meetings plus contact information of board members and committee chairs.......  get away frrom a main email address and let members be empowered to do their jobs and answer questions. Do not remove old/non-members from your email lists. Keep everyone in the loop about society activities and events. Partner with libraries, achives, other society's, schools, churches, museums etc...... you get additional publicity from these  organizations and different people coming to your events because of the partnership. If there are vendors or exhibitors at these events they also will be doing their own publicity. MORE publicity more people attending the event. And you can always negotiate with partners, facilities, vendors.

,,,and our good friend George Morgan speaking on How to Develop and Implement Affordable Membership Benefits........ excellent!! (George said a very big HELLO to everyone in Sacramento especially you John, He is still very impressed with our organization, the seminar itself and the baskets. Oh yes, those baskets for raffle......)

Look and talk to other society's. See what they offer, see how they offer it. Ask would this be good for our members. Need to offer monthly programs but it does not need to be a speaker each time. There is a lot of talent and experience, use the creativety of your members. Show and Tell is an excellent presentation and it is all member driven. (yahoo! we are aobve the curve). Their are all types of free webinars that are being offered and can be used as a topic for an evening. (exambple: Legacy Family Tree) Do your own webinars for the members that can not attend. Beginners Classes are always needed. Collaborate with local library on a community education program.  Working with the library publicize you will be at the library on a certain day(s) for anyone that needs some help in their family research. Plan day trips to other libraries (example would be the bus trip that GAS puts together to go down to the Sutro Library) ...and so many more great ideas that I will want to share with you when I get back home.

Josh Taylor (some of you will remember him from RootsTech  in Salt Lake  City in February and others will remember hime from several episodes of "Who Do You Think You Are?") spoke about Creating a Website for Your Societry. ALOT of excellent ideas for the website- what he thought makes a society website better. I am very impressed.

 Kathryn Doyle and Kim Cotton were as excited about Josh's ideas as I was. I  am right behind them, listening and getting as much information as possible, He really was very good.

Josh like everyone else this morning was just full of great ideas about society websites. First of course, get your membership involved. It is very important to let the public know who you are, why you exist and what you have to offer. Get your membership committee involved, the website sometimes is the first thing a potential members sees....... is it your best foot forward? Is it easy to navigate? Is there content? Is it current? Is the member information where it can be found easily? What are the programs they offer? What programs have they had in the past.? Reuse content when needed. The website can be a great storage resource - treasurers reports, meeting minutes, past publications ( Geni Gram /Preserves  and others). There should be long range planning, a budget. After a couple of years you may want a face lift, add new technology etc There should be Policies, Procedures and Permissions in place - technical support, daily maintenance. You should be able to make purchases directly from website.... Paypal, Elavon, Authorize.com and otheres. Pictures and video's can be added.  Or add pictures to Flickr and link to the pictures....... develop short videos about the society on YouTube and link to it from the website. How about a virtual tour of your library, where things are, how to use things. Create an archival/ history page of your society. Have a What's New at the Society page and keep it current. Create bibliographies, use Google Maps, gather local information (hotels, restaurants, weather, library hours & locations, and whatever else will make a researching traveler comfortable in your city) Spotlight volunteers, former and current officers. Give out awards. Do a research guide for your area, make sure that your hot links are active. Put up a mystery picture and let members and visitors comments and then publicize it. Same thing with a brickwall. Live streaming. Members only acess. Scrapbook page. Expand out.

Lunch time ..........   Exhibit Hall is open. SHOPPING!!! ............................ sorry to say I didn't purchase anything, just alot of looking. Maybe tomorrow.

Robert Raymond  spoke about Baby Steps with Evidence Analysis....... of course Elizabeth Shown Mills name and books were tossed around,  He did a case study with documents with different years of death - how to prove what the  real year is and how to write it up so you remember what you did and anyone looking at this person's information on the family tree. This is something that I need to read over again and digest it better. There is no cut and dry answer for this.

Another friend Thomas MacEntee, Root Cellar's 2013 Spring Seminar speaker...... spoke about "Internet Killed the Family History Star - How Technology has Changed the face of Genealogy" and  you say, What the heck is that all about? It was very interesting, Thomas spoke about the history of technology, how it is really scary because it is hard to keep up with all the changes and new items. His tips are 1)Manage information overload.... Google Alerts, let technology work for you, set up search alerts and let the information come to you. Goodgle Reader is also very helpful in setting up and organizing social media (facebook, twitter linkeden etc), 2) Follow a Curator .... a curator in this realm is someone who makes a point to be on top of technology and/or genealogy ... examples given are Dick Eastman, Kimberly Powell (About.com), Randy Seavors from Genea-Musings, Dear Myrtle, and of cours

and last but not least I attended a "FOLD3" session with Drinkwater. Alot of information. Don't know if you realize that FOLD3 was bought up by Ancestry.com. They are separate companies, doing different information, FOLD3 focus is with military information and original documents. Ancestry is mainly vital records, yes they have some military some that FOLD3 has and some they don't.

End of the day is the HOLLYWOOD GALA.........  red carpet, lots of glitz and diamonds and tiera's.

                                                               Good Night