What topics are important to you? Are there any emerging trends, technologies, or ideas that are worth discussing? How can the website, email list, or monthly meetings improve? Your thoughts and feedback are important! Please use the comments section to share your feedback.
I would love a tech forum of some sort where we could come and ask and answer questions. This would be for not old the really techie full-time web masters on campus, but also the part time faculty webmasters, the student webmasters, and the much larger community of folks making websites on campus.
A little bit off topic, but I think it would be great for the Webmasters group to continue reaching out to campus communicators (particularly folks on the “Communicators” email list). Our worlds often overlap (social media, accessibility, analytics, SEO, CMS platforms, etc).
What about an informal gathering of members of these groups at Top-of-the-Hill or somewhere? Meet-and-greet, network, etc.
There’s been a good deal of interest from our departments pertaining to HTML emails. It’s old-school technology, but given the budget crisis, our departments are keen on reaching out to alumni. Many of the groups are using the Harris Tool, which may or may not be a good solution for them. It would be helpful to triage the options (MailChimp? Vertical Response?) and identify where some of the pitfalls are (e.g. needing to know HTML, unsubscribes across multiple email listservs). Here’s a somewhat outdated report that may be of value. http://groundwire.org/resources/articles/email-service-provider-comparison-report-2010
I’d like to second the suggestion of choosing HTML emails as a meeting topic. It is a budget friendly tool that, unfortunately, is not always used as well as it could be.
I also think a Q-and-A tech forum would be a valuable resource.
I second all the ideas above. We have just started using MailChimp here, so I’d love to hear about others’ experiences with it and how to best take advantage of what it offers.