We are incredibly excited to report the near-completion of our web and administration systems refresh!
We are now utilizing a service called Wild Apricot, which offers website hosting to clubs and non-profits, along with contact and membership management services. While the look and feel of our website has remained essentially the same, Wild Apricot will allow us to significantly streamline our administrative processes, and to communicate with our members and those interested in straw building much more efficiently and effectively.
New Features
Here are just a few of the things that we hope will improve your experiences with CASBA:
- Email management: Anyone on our mailing list -- both current members and people on our email list -- can log into their account to update and manage their email subscription settings.
- Member profiles: Visible to members only, member profiles include things like your town/city and whether or not you currently own a straw bale building. There is also a privacy option to make yourself "invisible" to other CASBA members if you so choose.
- Member Contact Form: Also visible to members only, the Member Contact Form allows you to be emailed by other members without initially revealing your email addresses. In this way, members can be contacted while still maintaining privacy (Note: only the email sent from the form is private; if you respond to an email you will use your regular email program and will thereby share your email address).
- Group Membership "Bundles": We now have the ability to easily include the various members of our group memberships -- so the family or business colleagues associated with your membership can create their own accounts and receive emails if they wish. (If you have a group membership, see "To Log Into Your Account" below to add members to your "bundle.")
We will also shortly be launching a new straw building Forum (replacing our current Google group) for members to ask and answer questions of each other.
Your Status with CASBA
Many of our new features are "self-service," meaning you can log into the site at any time to manage your account and settings. While we have some people on our list who are simply interested parties, and have opted into our email lists, we of course encourage you to become a member (or re-up if your membership has expired). You can log in to see the status of your membership.
Log Into Your Account
To log into your account, you must first set up a password. Click the link below to receive a temporary password which will let you log into the site and create your own password.
http://www.strawbuilding.org/Sys/ResetPasswordRequest
Then use the form in the left-hand column of this site to log in.
As We Move Forward
As with any new software system, there is a learning curve and we know that we will likely run into a few issues here and there, and we appreciate your patience as we work out the kinks. All of CASBA's activities are managed by volunteers, so we hope you will forgive us some bumps and bruises in this process. And as always, we are grateful for any feedback so feel free to contact us with any comments or questions.
We look forward to providing you with even more straw building resources in the coming weeks and months!