February 6, 2012 -

COMMUNICATIONS COMMITTEE: I am currently looking for graphics/advertising professionals with ideas who might be willing to donate a few hours each month to help us upgrade our website and newsletter. There are other opportunities on several committees and sub-committees to serve the Sonoma County Republican Party Central Committee listed here on our home page.

If you are as tired of complaining about the Republican Party as I was before I started showing up and getting involved, and would like to change the GOP at the grassroots level, there are many opportunities to serve this committee. I don’t know about you, but when I dedided I wasn’t happy with how the national Republican Party was conducting itself, I decided to get involved and hopefully make a difference. If you’d like to make a difference too, come and join us!

COMMUNICATIONS: When I first considered offering to fill the empty Communications Director position, I thought I might be able to provide a more relevant website perhaps, and connect our committee to Twitter. I hadn’t given it much more thought than that. The “committee” part of the job description slipped right by my mind at that time.  Our Central Committee meetings seemed so sparsely attended since I had arrived in early 2008 that I thought it would be huge to just fill that position. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might be working with others at some point on this committee.

SONOMAGOP.ORG: Late last year, after I had been Communications Director for several months, a man showed up at his first Sonoma County Republican Central Committee meeting and apologetically and politely noted that our website was awful. Because my monthly reports had always acknowledged that fact, I took no offense. I had been looking for a nice patriotic template that I might use to upgrade our website’s appearance since I took this position.

While I am not a website developer by any stretch of the imagination, I do manage a stable of my own websites and blogs, so I wasn’t completely unfamiliar to the arena. I found an incredible template which includes a fresh new look, discussion forums both public and private, and email accounts for all who register on our website at www.sonomaGOP.org. It was quite the find, and I’m grateful for it. I would much rather have turned the website management aspect of this committee over to a professional website developer, and I still hope to do that in the very near future…as soon as I find a website builder/IT tech who is willing to donate a few hours of their time to the Sonoma County Republican Party.

NEW FORUMS, FACEBOOK, TWITTER, ETC.: The bottom line is that we do have a new look on our site, which includes discussion forums we never had before, as well as email accounts through which we can communicate privately with one another. I’ve set up separate forums for each of our districts so that Sonoma County residents can communicate directly with their District Representatives regarding matters which might be important to them. We also have a “slider” area which scrolls through photos and/or text messages on our homepage. We are discussing how we might best utilize that feature. For now, I’m using it to announce the forum, our connections to Facebook and Twitter and a reminder that our Central Committee meets once a month. We’ve had discussion about possibly providing ad space or personal announcements for business owners who donate to the local Central Committee. If you have any ideas how the slider area might be used, please come to our monthly meetings where we will be discussing it. This month we meet on Feb. 15th from 7-9pm at 1421 Guerneville Road in Santa Rosa, and our meetings are open to the public.