Provide Handbooks Folks Should Know About
Recreating the CMwD Directors Handbook online was very simple. Many of the documents, such as the By-laws, the Strategic Plan and the Minutes where already uploaded to the Web Site, and all I had to do was additionally upload the remaining documents and organize them all into a new Handbook Web page (called an “article” in our system). If you’d like to take a look at the Directors’ Handbook, it is HERE.
I opted to upload all the documents as separate PDF files to prevent them from accidentally being modified when used. In the Board Handbook, each document is referenced in a simple list. However, if you wanted to make available a more textual manual, there’s no reason the handbook couldn’t be created as a simple long document (might be awkward to reference, though).
Even better, in our system we have something called the Acajoom Newsletters function. It is what we use to create the CMwD Central Midwesterner. We have this set up to show an index of articles at the top of the publication with Hyperlinks to the individual articles, which are stored as separate documents in the system. A manual could use a similar system, creating a Table of Contents with hyperlinks to the chapters, so that users only have to click on the Table entry to go right to the chapter they want.
And best of all — the manual takes up no space in your office and doesn’t have to be carted around to meetings!
Peggy Boccard District Office Manager