Hello all-
I'm Jim Cypher, the Operations Manager at the Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline MA.
* Your nonprofit affiliation(s).
We are a non-profit educational and cultural institution dedicated to exploring the history of the automobile and its influence on our lives. We are fortunate enough to have as our President the former President of the Society of Automotive Historians. I am also the Membership Chair for the Nat. Assoc. of Automobile Museums and presented at our annual conference last year on "Improving Communications in a Museum Setting". Part of that was to recognize that over reliance on gadgets, techie gimmicks and over-engineered solutions is a pitfall and that two of the most important people in an organization can be the folks that sort (or mis-sort) the incoming mail and direct (or mis-direct) the incoming phone calls!
* Your role in creating, implementing, or maintaining the information technology infrastructure of your nonprofit organization(s).
As the Ops. Mgr. I am the titular head of IT, but we are lucky enough to have an ersatz Tech Committee that helps us in many ways, including procuring donated hardware, troubleshooting problems and implementing improvements. I used to sell computers and software then ran the complaint databse for a state regulatory agency. We are on Macs and going WiFi soon. Our webpage is in re-development... www.mot.org I have been instigating putting our library holdings online (OCLC) and participate in the Automotive Librarians Yahoo Group as well.
* Questions and issues pertaining to information technology that you hope to see addressed on this list.
Well, things are changing rapidly, I maintain our Member and Mailing List databases, do all the mass mailings, run the queries like... 5 til 5 on a Friday before a long weekend, "Find all the people who attended Ford Day last year who also attended a lecture within the past 5 years who live within driving distance! Sort by zip code."; along those lines. We have an e-mail newsletter and member relationship management is headed to a self-serve online system, so I'll have to find more to do soon!
- Jim Cypher
PS: I'm also a drag racer, DJ, artist and have a live call-in show on community access TV...
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