1. Resources and Strategies for Collaboration and Networking
Elizabeth Kozleski and Elaine Mulligan
Deaf-Blind Leadership Meeting
November 18, 2010

2. Implementing strategies to improve connectivity
Facebook page
Creating a Facebook page (not group) allows you to post resources and information that can be easily accessed by social media users. This can broaden your reach and engage younger, nontraditional community members.

3. Implementing strategies to improve connectivity
Blogs
Writing blogs (or having collaborators write them) helps share best practices and research broadly. Readers can use the blogs to disseminate information to their own networks, as well as to engage in conversations on topics through the “comments” feature.

4. Implementing strategies to improve connectivity
Searchable Resource Collections

5. Technology to inform decision making
Google Analytics
If you’re not already using Google Analytics to track your website usage, this is a great tool. You can see where your traffic is coming from (other sites in your network, search engines), analyze where your users spend their time, and use this information to guide decisions on what products or supports to develop to meet your users’ needs and interests.

6. Technology to inform decision making
Zoomerang or Constant Contact Surveys
There are two good sites for creating and disseminating surveys -- Zoomerang is free, and Constant Contact is fairly inexpensive for small networks. Surveys can help you evaluate the quality of your products, get user feedback on what resources you should develop, and even manage conference presentation proposals.

7. Technology to inform decision making
Data Maps
Publicly available data from IDEA Data, NCEO, and other federal data sites can be used to build Google maps or other formats to show what’s happening in your state, region, or nation-wide with disability identification and service delivery.

8. Engaging partners & stakeholders
Daily Facebook page updates/feed to website
Having a Facebook page won’t do much for your traffic unless you post regularly and connect with new users. We do this by setting a daily practice of posting something on our page from our network – this is an excellent way of prompting yourself to look at each other’s websites. Also, if you build a Facebook “feed” on your webpage, you will have new content on the website daily, which increases search engine traffic to your site.

9. Engaging partners & stakeholders
Resource of the Week/Day
Another way to keep your website content “fresh” and to increase usage of your resources is to have a Resource of the Week (or Day, if you’re that ambitious) on your front page. Use this to highlight useful tools in your collection and offer a little guidance on how to use them.

10. Engaging partners & stakeholders
Constant Contact
The Constant Contact dissemination service that we showed you for sending out surveys also offers a very easy to use, information-rich function. You can design announcements to go out to lists of contacts and track who opens them and

11. Developing structures for supporting collaboration
Wikis and Discussion Forums

12. For more information contact NIUSI-LeadScape