We’ve been looking for ways to help the business of the Association run more smoothly.  There are many activities that occur behind the scenes, some monthly and some seasonally, that we ask for your help with.  Ideally, we will have at least two members willing to learn and help with each of these activities.  Most of these would take only a couple of hours a month.  By creating these bite-sized chunks of work, this will significantly ease the work officers have been doing.  Overall, it will allow us to increase the quality of the product we produce, as we can only accomplish what you, our members, help us accomplish.  A successful Leadership Support Team will go a long way toward allowing the Association to achieve the goal of being sustainable over the long term, while producing high-quality results even across transitions of key leadership.

I’m asking every member to consider taking on some small part of this work.  Many of the activities listed below can be done sitting at a computer or on the phone.  Some of these will likely sound unfamiliar to you – please realize that the learning involved is no more difficult than learning to use a new website, and that experienced people are at hand to help you along.  If you can use the basics of a program like Microsoft Word, you have what it takes to help.  Please email ncbaexec@nocobees.org if you are willing to be one of the people to take on one or more of these activities.

Please look through the activities below, and see where you can chip in.

John Green
NCBA Secretary and Acting President

Monthly Activities

1. Routine updates to the website pages – adding NCBA events to the calendar, and updating the Past Meeting and Future Meeting pages, as well as posting articles to the main page of the website.  Executive Committee members would email you the content, so this would just involve updating the WordPress pages.
2. Assemble MailChimp newsletters – again, Executive Committee members would email paragraphs to you for inclusion in the beginning of month or mid-month newsletter.  The MailChimp website makes it easy to update our newsletter pages.
3. Once a month print and mail the newsletter to the 20 or so member households that don’t receive it by mail – we can print mailing labels to make this pretty easy.
4. Data Entry from membership and order forms, or checking the accuracy of our records.  This area is most active in the first four months of the year, and we hope that website improvements outlined below will significantly reduce the level of effort required here next year. Right now this information is entered into a spreadsheet.
5. Contacting members whose email addresses are no longer working to get accurate information. Right now this is an area that has been neglected, both for our newsletter distribution list and for the NCBAmembers discussion list.
6. Bringing refreshments to meetings – please sign up for a month or two!  Email Merry Popa at volunteer@nocobees.org.
7. Would you like to see more family-oriented weekend events?  We are open to sponsoring things like this, but need someone to lead the way.

Special Website Projects

We’d like to update our website to accept payment for dues and annual orders, and to collect all the information that is currently on Membership, Bee Order, and Woodenware order forms.  Ideally, maintaining a full Membership database with an ability to export the data would be a part of this project.   If you have some aptitude or expertise in this area and would be willing to assist our Webmaster Tim Hardy, please let us know.

Annual Projects

In addition to our new Leadership Support Team, the major Annual Projects we sponsor are also in need of support:

1. Beginning Beekeeping Class – This team, which has been ably lead by Carolina Nyarady for many years now, needs some fresh faces each year.  It is scheduled for the last three Saturdays of January 2014, 8 AM to 12:30 PM.
2. Package Bee Order Team – There are a variety of needs on this team, including entering and verifying order information, being a part of the shipment pickup team, which often has occurred during the wee dark hours of the morning, and helping with package distribution.
3. Woodenware Order Team – This team has the same kind of needs as the Package Bee order – order entry and verification, checking in the order and separating out items to individual member orders, and helping with order distribution.  If the woodenware order happens in 2014 – and this will depend upon the level of support you provide – the order will happen somewhat earlier to make sure there is plenty of time for back-ordered items to arrive and still have full order distribution happen by April 1 so you have sufficient assembly time before bees arrive