May 15, 2003
Please feel free to invite some of your
colleagues from your or another city/county if you think it would benefit them
to be part of our group!
Desktop alert demonstration
Kevin Whelan, Johnson Co., announced that the county is arranging for a demonstration
of Lincoln, NE’s desktop alert system. MAGWeb members are also invited to
attend. This alert system works much like WeatherBug. It can give instant notification
and information related to any type of event: weather-related, amber alerts and
other emergencies. It sits as an icon on a user’s desktop and blinks or
beeps during an emergency. Messages can be crawled across the user’s screen
or you can click on the icon for more information.
The demo is tentatively scheduled sometime in mid- to late June.
He will send details via the listserv.
Web site promotion
Rich Lovett shared some data from the City of Denver and Miami-Dade County,
FL. They each underwent major Web site promotion campaigns last year, costing
$89,000 and $250,000 respectively. Methods used ranged greatly:
• Newspaper ads
• Web site banner ads on newspaper sites and large portal sites such as
Yahoo
• Direct mail
• Van wraps around city vehicles
• Public service announcements
• Interior bus cards
• Bumper stickers, lapel pins, magnets, etc.
• Radio drive-time ads
• Ads on the back of library receipts
• Web site address listed in all employee’s e-mail signature block,
all newspaper ads, news releases, city checks, promotional items, voicemail,
on-hold recordings, flaps of business envelopes
Kansas City Regional Web Forum
Plans for the Kansas City Regional Web Forum are progressing. The group has
come up with an initial list of possible topics, but is always looking for more.
Send your ideas or guest speaker suggestions to Rich Lovett (rich_lovett@kcmo.org).
This conference will be Oct. 2-3 at the Doubletree in downtown KCMO and is sponsored by the City of Kansas City, Mo., the City of Overland Park, Kan., and the Kansas City Metro Area Government Webmasters (MAGWeb), in cooperation with PTI. The registration fee will be somewhere in the neighborhood of $125.
A “save the date” message has been set out to various city/county web manager listservs. The agenda will be nailed down sometime soon. Look for details via the listserv soon.
July meeting: TBA, regional conference
There will be no MAGWeb meeting in June, since many members of the group won’t
be able to attend. Therefore, the next meeting will be on July 17. If you have
a suggestion for a topic, please let me know. We will also devote some time
to planning the PTI regional forum mentioned above and to any other issues or
topics the group would like to discuss.
The meeting will be at 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, July 17, at the MARC offices, 600 Broadway.
Some folks usually do lunch after the meeting. Let the group know if you’d like to join.
If you have any ideas for future topics or guest speakers, please share them with Susan Waters, Overland Park (sjwaters@opkansas.org) or send them via the listserv.
SJW