Digital Onboarding Level III

Created by Ronnie Gelman, Modified on Fri, 20 Oct, 2023 at 4:36 PM by Ronnie Gelman

Digital Onboarding - Level 3

A “how to” document describing how to gain access, use, and learn the language of our digital operating systems.

Managing the Lifeboat Academy Inbox

“friends@lifeboat.academy” comes into a gmail inbox (the account for which is friendsofthelifeboatacademy@gmail.com). We share the responsibility for monitoring the LA inbox, with one Peer checking the inbox each morning.

We have created labels (which work like tags) to represent each of the functional areas. Some areas may have sub-labels for special projects. Each email can have multiple labels assigned to them which means the same message would be visible if you looked in any of the particular areas. For example, “Pigs” have a sub-label for each year’s pig sale inquiries, deposits, and payments and any of those messages that include receipts would also be labeled with “Highgrove Inc. / Receipts”

When messages come in, the first person to see the message should label it with the right functional area / project and decide if it requires a response / action or just needs to be filed.

If it requires response / action, star it and tag (label) with the most appropriate person to respond. If it’s not you, [send a Slack head’s up as a direct message / add an Asana task / other?] to let them know.

As long as email conversations are active, leave the message in the shared inbox. If we have responded and are waiting for a response to come back, click off the star. As soon as things are resolved, click off the star (if not done already) and archive the message.

Lifeboat Academy Calendar

For managing farm commitments, events, or notable times for the people of the Lifeboat Academy.

How to grant editing access to the Lifeboat Academy calendar

If you have access to the friendsofthelifeboatacademy gmail, then you can already access and edit the farm calendar from there using google apps. For things like time on or off the farm, add day-long events to document it.
If you are 1) full-time on the farm, 2) use google calendar already and 3) have a complicated calendar, you could add your normal gmail calendar to the farm view. Individual’s calendars can be toggled on and off as appropriate to keep the overall calendar view neat.
In rare cases, you might want to create a separate google calendar (e.g. “Teya's Farm calendar”) that you only add farm related days into, and we can add that to the farm calendar (without you having direct access). And when you add to Teya's Farm calendar, it'll update within Highgrove's calendar

Note: Our calendar is also shareable (unsure if this link may change over time)

Adding Posts to the Website

[To be developed]

Asana Advanced

Because of how interconnected Asana is to our meeting facilitation, the “Advanced Asana” how to guide is incorporated into the The Nitty Gritty Stuff (mostly for facilitators).

MailChimp and Newsletters

PW: x9813KDaosjy!

(You might need a two-factor authentication code sent to Ben's phone)

Then go to "Campaigns" and “Replicate” the most recent newsletter.

Creating a Segment

The questions we ask on the landing page create a "group" and each of the boxes people can check is a "group name".

You can create a "segment" from this information by going to the MailChimp dashboard, clicking Audience > All Contacts then clicking the "New Segment" button.

Select the left most box in the line and select the group (which will be the question asked on the landing page) and which group names you want included in the segment.

In the Lifeboat example, the group would equal "What's your lifeboat status?" and you could select to send only to those who clicked "I'm ready to start building my lifeboat" and send a campaign only to them.

To schedule daily meme posts:

Log in to Buffer to schedule 5 posts (Monday-Friday) for the following channels: Facebook page, Instagram, Mastodon (eventually)

For the “caption” of each post, please type the following:

The quote/text from the meme you are posting (so that blind or hard-of-seeing folks using assistive devices can still read the text)
Relevant hashtags so that people looking up different tags will see the post.

Some standard hashtags that we use are #LifeboatAcademy (always use this one), #sustainability, #climate, #community, #farm, #regenerativeagriculture, #permaculture, #sociocracy, #resilience, #gardening, etc. Use the tags you feel are most relevant to the meme you’re posting.

Checking the Lifeboat Academy Facebook Group

Peers share the responsibility of fulfilling the “admin” role in our Facebook group. Ask someone else who is an admin to make you an admin in the group. Responsibilities include:

welcoming new members in a post (can wait until there are at least 2 or 3 new members) and inviting them to share a bit about themselves and where they are in the lifeboat building process.
Responding to any questions or comments in the group (with input from other peers; nobody has to respond to anything alone / if they are unsure)

Checking the Lifeboat Academy Facebook Page

Ask another peer to give you access to managing our Facebook page. Shared responsibilities include:

Responding to any questions or comments on the page (with input from other peers; nobody has to respond to anything alone / if they are unsure)

Targeted FB ads

We can set up a targeted ad on Facebook to run a week before a scheduled event to sign up. We can also set up ads to advertise our general offerings, articles, and other content, and collect emails to add to our lists.

Peers work together to decide the “target” metrics for each Facebook ad
What content are we advertising? How many people do we want to reach / how much money do we want to spend?
Keep track of FB ad results - how many likes, shares, comments, email sign-ups, event sign-ups?
Add metrics to spreadsheet

Weekly video posted to social media

A shared task at the weekly Sprint planning meeting (Sundays) will be to decide what project/event on the farm will be filmed and shared as the new weekly video.

As a peer, you can access our TikTok account and use footage from the week (found in the shared content folder) to edit and post the weekly episode. Use How to make a TikTok video for reference.

You’ll want to start editing the video on Sunday or Monday to make sure that it’s ready to post on Tuesday morning.

Once the video is published, you or an apprentice can post it to the other platforms we use. (See Digital Onboarding - Level 2.docx for more info about this.)

Post weekly video on Buffer to our Facebook page, Instagram and Mastodon after the peer has edited and uploaded it to TikTok. Remember to post with hashtags! If you’re unsure which ones to use, ask the peer to share the ones that they used in the original post.