Activity Schedule Guidelines 2011 June - From Your Editor
Let us review the Activity Schedule Process.
COP runs 600-800 trips every year!
Please pay attention to deadlines. Ideally, your activity schedule coordinator will send you a reminder email that includes their deadline for receipt of schedule items. Even if they don’t, deadlines are published every month, usually on page three. At least one issue a year has an early deadline due to the editor’s vacation. This year it is the September issue. Your SC will be operating on a short timeline and their time and effort should be respected.
If your Schedule Coordinator sends out a draft schedule, be sure to read it.
Send your trip listing your Activity’s Schedule Coordinator (SC) (page 3 again), or if the activity doesn’t have one, the Activity Chair (AC).
The Schedule Coordinator / Activity Chair needs to submit a compiled schedule for the whole activity no later than 11:59 p.m. the 5th of the month, the month before publication. I.e. July 5th for the August newsletter. This is sent as a plain text file that is complete and ready to be placed into the newsletter. All the editor should need to do is apply the styles and a few “info and app are on page X”, which is info the SC won’t have.
The Editor will not accept schedule items from individual leaders. However, if you are leading an Event (bike tour, boat school, etc.) and need information in other sections of the newsletter, that information does go direct to the Editor. Both the Editor and your Schedule Coordinator should acknowledge receipt of your submission with at least a “thank you”. If you do not such a response, it is quite possible that your submission did not get to them.
Unless you make other arrangements with your Schedule Coordinator , send it via email. If doing this electronically, it needs to be in plain text, with no formatting. (no bold, italics, all caps, etc.).
Newsletter issues normally only include information for that issue month plus the next. Occasionally we run an entire season listing for use as a fridge poster, but please don’t submit the entire season every month. It causes extra headaches for your schedule coordinator when they have to edit the excess.
For recurring trips, You have two options:
1. Send your Schedule Coordinator a confirmation monthly that the ride is continuing
2. Send the listing with an ENDING DATE
Also, if there is a week off, send a notice that can be posted to the web calendar, or the trip can be deleted for that week outright.
Responsibility for getting a trip/event listed in the newsletter and web calendars lies with the leader, as it always has. Please do not expect that someone else is going to submit your trip unless you have discussed this with that person.
In addition to compiling the schedule, some other tasks your Schedule Coordinator does are:
- If Schedule Coordinator does not recognize the person as being an approved leader, questions are asked, including” have you taken appropriate leader training, first aid/rescue classes, do you have the skills for the job? Yes, this is officially an AC task, but it is usually delegated to the SC.
- Posts the schedule to the web calendar.
- The Schedule coordinator, may, at their discretion, add activities to the web calendar after the newsletter has gone to print.
The Specified Format
The following is the format in which you are expected to submit your information:
Line one: Title
- Please, Do not type the title in all caps. It may appear in the newsletter as having small caps instead of lower case, but that is a style. In order to apply it, the text must be in normal upper/lower case form. In other words, if you send WRONG instead of Wrong, it will be WRONG instead of Wrong.
- If your trip will be in a titled section of the schedule, please don’t use that title as the trip title.
- Example: If your trip will be listed in the SMP section of the boating schedule, don’t use SMP as the title. All trips in that section are SMPs. . Using SMP as the title is left over from the days when they were mixed into the general boating schedule.
- Weekly trips should include the day in the title, i.e. Canal Winchester Mondays, to distinguish it from Canal Winchester Thursdays.
Line two: Date: If just one day, include the day of the week.
Line 3 to ?:paragraph or two of description including trip level of difficulty, approximate cost, deposit/refund information if called for.
- Notes like: "contact leader for directions' and more detailed information will be provided at later date" need to be in the description section above the leader info line, not after.
Last line: contact information including name, email if any, and phone number
- Please use our official format of 614/555-1234.
- If you want to reduce the amount of spam you get, present your email address as username AT domain.ext rather than username@domain.ext
- Try to put all the leader contact information on one line (no returns/enter button)
- Leading off with words like “Leader” and “Contact” is redundant since it is the leader contact line.
Here is an example of a Wednesday Night Paddle schedule submission:
Frisbee Park to Downtown
June 20, 2012 6:30 pm
Frisbee Park to Downtown Paddle on the Scioto River.
Frisbee Park is on the west side of Riverside Drive,( Rt 33).
This will be a shuttle trip involving class 1 rapids.
Leader: Walt Taylor, 614-519-8633 kayakcolumbus@gmail.com
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