More than you ever wanted to know about Alabama native Joe Watts
Quick job for my friends at AccuPrint, downtown Birmingham, Alabama. We’re sending out a monthly postcard with the calendar for the month. Margie decided to have me take a different scene of downtown Birmingham each month. Here’s the second scene (around 3rd Avenue North and 20th Street North):
Finished another newsletter yesterday. I actually finished several newsletters so far this month–the first half of each month seems to hold at least three newsletters and on some months six or more. In the issue of the Alabama Sierran:
River Action Day Success; Tom’s Top 10 Hikes; Montgomery Water
Festival; Alabama’s Attractions; Scenic River Trail; And the Winner Is
the Trees; Outings and Events; Contacts, and more. Download the newsletter on the Sierra Club’s website (no, I don’t do their website): http://alabama.sierraclub.org/statenewsletters.html
Also finished up several other projects yesterday:
A quick postcard for my friends at AccuPrint. I’ve been working with AccuPrint since 1998 or so. Maybe before then. I got to know them when I was working with the Cahaba Group of the Sierra Club. I’ve continued to use them for much of my printing work. They are typically very fast and always entertaining. Best of all, they really are a family-owned and operated business. The dogwood blooms are particularly beautiful. Photo taken along Highland Avenue (unfortunately, the dogwoods by our house didn’t fare well during last summer’s brutal drought, so they are just barely alive and certainly not blooming).
Yesterday, I finished the monthly newsletter for the American Institute of Architects, Birmingham Chapter (www.aiabham.org). This morning, I’m preparing to finish up the monthly newsletter for CGH Insurance Group. Hopefully, I’ll have it wrapped up by the end of the day. (I’ve been working harder on this one than usual–mainly because I’ve been trying to set aside more lead time for other folks.) More to follow…
If it has been a few weeks since you looked at the Your Town Alabama blog, you should really take a peek again. I’ve added several dozen entries in the last three weeks (almost one entry every day). Good stuff, I think. I’ve noticed a significant increase in the number of hits the website is getting on a daily basis as a result of the blog, so overall I’m very pleased.
And in other news, I’m off tomorrow to visit the folks in Thomasville to discuss Alabama’s Front Porches. This isn’t my site design (actually, it is the old State Tourism Department’s website design that was borrowed for use in the Black Belt). The site design works okay, but needs some work. There are some coding issues that need to be addressed. Keywords need to be modified to tighten the tourism focus to the Black Belt and the counties that this project concentrates on.
The content is in need of some work as well. That’s where I come in. I’m working with the University of Alabama and Ala-Tom RC&D to provide some additional content–and content direction. We’ll be meeting tomorrow to get some organizational discussions moving forward. This is a pretty big project, and really important, too. Having grown up so near there with sisters who still live there makes me want to do all I can to make it a better place–and to show other people what a wonderful place it already is!
I’ve been busier with newsletters this month even more so than usual. I’ve completed the Alzheimer’s of Central Alabama Spring 2008 newsletter (complete with a redesign), the April 2008 issue of the Sierra Club’s Alabama Sierran, the Birmingham Chapter of the American Institute of Architects Birmingham Chapters March newsletter, a Your Town Alabama newsletter and CGH Insurance Group’s newsletter. Who knows, I may be forgetting a newsletter.
Some of these go out via mail (about 9,500 of them) and about another 1,000-1,200 go out via email. (Both of the mailed newsletters do get posted on the respective websites, so they get additional views as well.)
Anyway, I was adding up the number of people these go out to collectively and I realized that, probably for the first time, I’ve hit the 10,000 person mark for newsletter communications. It just seems pretty cool to me. No real significance to it, really, but I find it secretly pleasing.