How to Share Announcements, Events and Trainings, and Outages

Announcements, Events and Trainings, and Outages can be assigned to Affinity Groups. To assign a post to an Affinity Group, you must be a Coordinator of that Affinity Group.

See also: Affinity Group Coordinators Info
To become a coordinator: Open a ticket

Announcements are published at https://support.access-ci.org/announcements and are general news items, supporting title, description that can contain HTML, a featured image, and tags.

1. Use the “Add Announcement” button on the https://support.access-ci.org/announcements

2. Add Title in title case: i.e. Lorem Ipsum Dolor sit Amet

3. Add Body text: Use bold, italic, lists, images, and links as needed.

4. To customize excerpt that shows on the Announcements page: Use the “Edit Summary” link

5. Add an optional Featured Image that will be displayed on the announcement listing page and at the top of your announcement item. Other images can be added inline in the body text.

6. Tags help people find you content

7. Affinity Group Coordinators can add Affinity Groups to send the announcement to that group and have it appear on that Affinity Group page.

1. Save as “Draft” at any point. Once you have created a announcement it will show up under “My Announcements” on the announcements page.

2. Change status to “Ready for Review” and an admin will be notified and they will approve and post the announcement or send you an email requesting an edit.

3. If you are an Affinity Group Leader you can change the status of your announcement to “Published” without requiring an administrator to approve it.

4. If you need to make an edit you can find all of your announcements in “My Announcements” on the announcements page. If you make a revision there is a field for “Revision log message” so that we will know what you have changed.

Events and Trainings are published at ​https://support.access-ci.org/events and can be single events or recurring events. Events can have a date and time, location, contact information, and registration link in addition to a title and description.

Any authenticated person can add a Community Announcement or Event to the ACCESS website. Posts by people who are not Affinity Group Leaders will require review by an administrator.

1. Use the “Add Event” button on the ​Events & Trainings page

2. Add Title in title case: i.e. Lorem Ipsum Dolor sit Amet

3. Choose Event Type: Most events will be Custom/Single Events, but there are options for recurring events on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

4. Select date and time for event(s).

5. Add Body text: Use bold, italic, lists, images, and links as needed.

6. Add Location and Contact information. It is possible to use html links in these fields if desired.

7. Add optional Registration link.

8. Tags help people find you content

9. Affinity Group Coordinators can add Affinity Groups to send the event to that group and have it appear on that Affinity Group page.

• Enable registration per event or for an entire event series.

• Choose whether registration stays open until the event starts or closes on a set deadline.

• Set unlimited seats or a fixed capacity, with an optional waitlist.

• ​​Schedule a registration reminder, if needed.

• If you have appropriate permissions, you can select an ACCESS project to automatically add approved registrants.

• Configure automatic pre and post event surveys for registrants, if you would like. Find out more about the survey feature.

• You will receive a daily email if new registrations have been received.

• Registrants receive an email when you approve their registration.

• Approvals can be done individually or select “Approve all” registrants.

• You can send custom email messages to approved registrants and/or waitlisted users.

• You can view and download a list of registrants, includes name, email, ACCESS ID, and the date or registration.

• The number of registrations can be displayed on the public event listing, if desired.

1. Save as “Draft” at any point. Once you have created an event it will show up under “My Events” on the events page.

2. Saving an event creates an Event Series and one or more Event Instances. For most events, this distinction doesn’t matter. However, for recurring events, you can override details from the series to customize individual events.

3. Change status to “Ready for Review” and an admin will be notified and they will approve and post the event or send you an email requesting an edit.

4. If you are an Affinity Group Leader you can change the status of your event to “Published” without requiring an administrator to approve it.

5. If you need to make an edit you can find all of your events in “My Events” on the news page. If you make a revision there is a field for “Revision log message” so that we will know what you have changed.

• Video recordings of events can be added to the event after it happens so that they will appear on the Recorded Events and Trainings page

• To add a video, go to the Events page and select My Events.

• Open the event you created and select Edit (If you are not the owner of the event, ask the event creator to add the video or open a support ticket to request that the video be added).

• Under Video use the “Add Media” button.

• Add the URL to your video on Vimeo YouTube in the field “Add Remote video via URL”.

• The video will now appear on the Recorded Events and Trainings page.

Resource specific outages and reconfiguration news are published at ​https://operations.access-ci.org/infrastructure_news and can be planned or unplanned. Infrastructure news items have a type (full outage, partial outage, or reconfiguration), have a start date, may have an end date, and must affect one or more infrastructure elements.

More detailed information is available at the ​https://operations.access-ci.org/online_services/infrastructure_news page.

Current and planned outages associated with infrastructure that is associated with an Affinity Group will be displayed on the Affinity Group page.