ASHRAE INsights

SEATTLE—The Puget Sound Chapter recently launched a blog to provide members with a new avenue to interact.

“We are finding that the blog fulfills most of the needs of a traditional chapter Web site, but with some limitations that can be addressed if we keep the chapter Web site as a supplement,” Rand Conger, chapter president, said. “We are slowly melding them, so that the blog and the Web site work together and have a similar appearance.  The blog is very good at keeping in constant contact with the membership, and the Web site is good at hosting documents and static information that does not need constant updating.”

Another advantage is that the blog makes day-to-day maintenance of the Web site more of a collaborative effort vs. funneling updates and changes through one administrator, according to Conger. This speeds up getting information on the Web, allowing committee chairs and other officers to directly publish their notifications.

“Much of our newsletter is made up of blog articles, just reformatted for readability in that format,” he said. “This allows our newsletter editor to use the blog for content that he feels may be of interest to the membership, and thus deliver valuable information to our members via e-mail that they would not have seen if they don’t visit the blog.”

Conger said that so far, the blog has not received many comments but he is hopeful as members get more familiar with it, they will comment more frequently.

“What we have seen in the way of trends of usage is that we get big spikes in readership when we highlight items on the blog via e-mail or newsletter,” he said.  “It seems that the baseline readership is trending upwards as people get used to going to this site to get information on what is occurring locally and Society wide.”

To read the Puget Sound blog, visit  http://pugetsoundashrae.blogspot.com.