Communicating with you in 2020
By Ilana DeBare
Happy 2020! As one of our new year’s resolutions, we want to make sure you’re getting all our communications.
In the “olden days”—meaning for the first 90 years or so of Golden Gate Bird Alliance’s 103-year history— things were simple. We mailed out a single monthly newsletter, The Gull. It was black and white and rarely had images. If important news happened in between those monthly mailings, tough luck finding out about it.
Today’s digital era gives us many more ways to communicate—more quickly, and with wonderful color bird photos. But this can get confusing. So we want to be sure you’re not missing any of our news or event announcements.
Email newsletters. Are you receiving our monthly email blasts that list upcoming field trips, speaker series, and other events? If not, email Communications Manager Melissa Ramos at mramos@goldengatebirdalliance.org and let her know you want to join our email list. (If you received our email blasts in the past but are not currently getting them, our email service may have unsubscribed you for some mysterious reason. Tell Melissa you want to re-subscribe.)
Blog. If you’re reading this via email, you’re already subscribed to our blog. Yay! No need to do anything. (If you’re reading this on our web site and want to receive the blog by email, click here.)
GGBA Chat online group. This is our newest communications forum. It’s two-way communication, meaning we hope you’ll post notes as well as read them! This is a free online discussion group where GGBA members and friends post links or comments about bird science, local conservation issues, and GGBA activities. We are also using this to share info about last-minute field trip changes such as rain cancellations, so if you attend field trips, it’s worth joining this group. (The chat site can send you the latest posts by email, and you can choose the frequency. For instance, I have them bundle posts so I get no more than one GGBA Chat email per day.) You can find and view the GGBA Chat group at https://groups.io/g/GGBA-Chat.
The Gull. If you’re a dues-paying member of Golden Gate Bird Alliance, you should also be receiving The Gull, our quarterly magazine. You can choose whether to receive a print version by post or a PDF version by email. (PDF saves trees and postage!) If you would like to switch from print to the digital version, email Melissa at mramos@goldengatebirdalliance.org. And if you’re not currently an official member of GGBA, we encourage you to join: Click here.
Whew! Have we exhausted you yet? There are still our social media gathering spots: Meetup.com, which is another way to learn about our field trips, plus Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
With all this communication, do we still have time to go birding? You bet. I’m signing off now because there are some Buffleheads waiting for me on Bolinas Lagoon, and they don’t do email.
