Structure

The Service Leaders are Robert Blauvelt (First Unitarian Society of Denver), and Kok Heong McNaughton (Unitarian Church of Los Alamos)

Other team members are:

• Al Bailey (UU Church of Las Cruces) as webmaster
• Neil McBurnett (UU Church of Boulder) as assistant webmaster
• Rich Richins (UU Church of Las Cruces) as Dispatch editor
• Judy Phillips (UU Church of Ogden) as Dispatch distributor
• Marlene Eggers (South Valley UU Church) as Awards Coordinator

Our Board Liaison is Charles Scholz

• Website maintenance and redesign continue to be an ongoing responsibility of this service area. We have a job description in place for a professional web designer to help redesign the website.
• We have began recruiting one Communications Representative from each affiliated congregation, emerging congregation and small meeting group to form the network of communications within the district
• We continue to work with the other service areas to ensure that all district programs receive support and publicity through The Dispatch, mdd-announce email list and the District Website.
• We are using up all of our allocated district email lists sponsored by uua.org and people are encouraged to start their own lists through yahoogroups.com. A step-by-step instruction on how to do this is available on the District Website.
• Subscription to mdd-announce is up to around 400 unique email addresses while mdd-community (a yahoogroups.com list) has seen more recent traffic. It is hoped that this list be used to build community and that when it reaches over 100 subscribers (currently sitting at around 40) that it can become the spring board for creating online covenant groups to meet the needs of those isolated UUs in our district.
• Whenever possible, Service Area Leaders (SALs) continue to attend cluster and District gatherings to be kept informed in order to enhance intra district communications.
• Promoted District Awards program, received nominations and selected awardees to be honored at the district Annual Conference
• Worked with office staff to begin process of installing broadband
  internet connection in district office
• Developed and presented to the District Board a proposal for a program for promotion of district services

Issues

• Our district announcement list, mdd-announce, remains the fastest and most-effective communication channel in our district. However, even with an aggressive subscription practice of automatically adding every minister, DRE and Office Administrator, it's reaching less than 10% of our total membership directly and possibly a larger number indirectly through chain effects. We would like to request that all district meetings that require registration to include in their registration forms a line for people to fill in to indicate whether or not they want to receive district announcements through this channel. We would also like to request that all other meetings that pass around sign-up sheets with email addresses to ask if the participants would like to do the same.
• Recruitment of Congregational Representatives from all groups can be a challenge. We'll be looking for help from Small Congregation Resource Liaisons to help recruit representatives from their assigned
  congregations.
• Developing the promotion and marketing program will require additional funds to pay for the professional skills required.
• Internet access from the District computer is slow with dial-up connection and the computer's performance is less then desirable. Neal McBurnett will work with the district staff to explore and implement by the end of this year a faster internet connection with possibly software upgrades to the existing system. The fund for this will come out of this Service Area's funding until the end of the fiscal year after which it will be included as a regularly budgeted office expense.