Hi Bill. Thanks for that. I am a former journalist and communications professional. I have InDesign on my computer.
Does your chapter allow people to opt out of the information in the directory? Or is a directory listing a compulsory part of membership? And what types of information do you list in each directory entry for each member?
Thanks.
I can probably provide you more detailed information off-line, but I will be tied up for the next several days so it may be the weekend before I get around to it. I need to search to see if I still have the InDesign template. I don't think that the Excel worksheet would be of any use since your club's membership record keeping wouldn't be the same as ours.
To answer your question about what is in the directory, it's basically what you find in the phone book: name, address, phone number, plus email address and mug shot. The front section of the directory lists the club officers and gives our club history. Some members who seem to be camera shy just get a silhouette in place of their photo. We have threatened to substitute cartoon characters if they don't have an actual photo, but so far we haven't followed through with pictures of Goofy or Howdy Doody.
The cover is heavyweight card stock paper. I liked parchment type paper for the cover. Finding a good printing service was hit-and-miss until one of our members said he had a good friend who owned a print shop. They actually understood things like cropping. I tried Kinko's once because their advertising sounded like they were a professional service and what I got back was crap ... poor image quality and ragged untrimmed edges. Office Max did a much better job for half the price. So far we have stuck with B/W which I suppose is more than adequate.
I'm sort of a stickler for consistency and some of the other folks who took care of the membership records in Excel were sometimes a bit more laid back so I would have to spend time reconciling things like Drive vs. Dr. or Dr in a street name and "Bubba" vs. (Bubba) vs. *Bubba* for a nickname and Fort Worth vs. Ft. Worth for the city. I might have been the only one who noticed or cared, but as long as I was doing the directory I wanted it to look professional.
We are a very large club so pictures helps members associate faces and names. The biggest part of the job is probably the photography and editing. We do have a notice about respecting privacy and not sharing information in the book with anybody. As far as I know, nobody has ever asked to opt out ... maybe if we had members who were on the run from the law or in the witness protection program things would be different.
Occasionally, someone would want to have the directory on our club's website, but I have been adamantly opposed to that idea. Being an engineer and computer geek, I knew that unless you have an encrypted site, password protection really isn't any protection against hacking. It's just a false sense of security.
