Here's how to Join the Friends
You can join just by signing the CWIRE guestbook and telling us the name of your hometown, what you like about CWIRE, and how CWIRE can improve. As CWIRE partner-agencies apply for grant funding and corporate sponsorship, and as CWIRE seeks endorsements from city governments, schools, and other community groups, we need to demonstrate that we are, in fact, serving the local community.

What You Can Do to Help CWIRE
OK, so you've joined the Friends by signing the guestbook. Now what? If you want to help gather information and contact community organizations and build the CWIRE website, you can join the WWWolunteers.

But if you don't want to build webpages, you can still help out in a big way without much effort! You can help us by spreading goodwill!

Here's the strategy: Volunteers build free webpages for nonprofits. Nonprofits help to find more volunteers to develop and exploit these free webpages (by posting contact information, events, fundraisers, volunteer opportunities, newsletters, etc.).

The Friends of CWIRE play a critical role in the success of this community partnership by "talking-it-up" -- helping to publicize and promote CWIRE in the community.

How You Can Help to Publicize CWIRE
If you like what CWIRE is doing for your community, please help us by taking advantage of all the free publicity that is available to you.

1. See "CWIRE How-To Manual" for ideas and instructions.
2. Sign the CWIRE guestbook It sounds too simple -- too easy -- but it really works!
3. Encourage your friends and colleagues to sign the CWIRE guestbook: you can do that just by sending them a brief e-mail "endorsement."
4. Register your favorite clubs and organiziations for a free 5-page listing on CWIRE. Use this email form. There is no charge for non-commercial organizations to be listed in CWIRE's directory of local organizations
5. Write to your City Coucil or School Board or address them in person, and encourage them to endorse our efforts. A simple endorsement will encourage others to act: to contribute time or money.
6. Link to Community Wire. We make it easy for you -- you don't have to know HTML!
7. Link to a Friend of Community Wire. By helping one of our many friends, you are indirectly helping Community Wire. That's what community is all about! You have over 400 local organizations from which to choose! For a list of links to paste into your webpage, see our Gallery of Web-Links.
8. Help CWIRE's Volunteer Section Editors by browsing through CWIRE looking for typos, errors, omissions, or "questionable" material, and send corrections to the editor of that section (noted at the bottom of each page).

If you're comfortable with writing HTML code, you can easily paste a link to CWIRE into your website!

Students, interns, and volunteer instructors are needed! By taking advantage of the many free programs offered by CWIRE and our sponsor-partners, you can help yourself and/or your organization while at the same time helping other local schools, churches, and worthy causes.

How CWIRE Can Help
CWIRE can help you find the information you need, and introduce you to a friendly neighbor. We regret that CWIRE no longer can provide free orientation WWWorkshops on a regular basis, or free hands-on training in HTML. These important services are still available by appointment for a modest fee, and are also provided by local schools and other agencies. We recommend that you investigate web-based training, which will help you jump-in and take full advantage of CWIRE quickly.

About Community Wire Service
The Community Wire Service (CWIRE) is a community-operated civic network for the Arroyo Verdugo communities of Southern California (Burbank, Glendale, La Caņada Flintridge, Pasadena, South Pasadena), and other parts of Los Angeles. CWIRE was launched in 1992 by local resident, Robert Marston, as a fax-on-demand directory of organizations. Later, as the World Wide Web emerged, the directory was converted to an online community directory, and an online community calendar was added. With the popularity and low costs of the Internet, CWIRE has expanded to serve several hundred local nonprofit organizations and has raised support from many sponsors and contributors over the years. (CWIRE's server logs are posted on the web for all to see.)

Nonprofit charitable groups and volunteers pay nothing to post information on CWIRE. CWIRE is financially supported through the generosity of our sponsors and contributors and the many Friends of Community Wire. It only takes a handful of commercial sponsors to cover the overhead costs of providing these free services to the whole community. CWIRE currently has no paid staff, and no advertising budget. We plan to transfer our content to independently-operated "regional portal sites." These community-sites will subscribe to the "wire service" and publish our content, keeping CWIRE's overhead costs low.

Please link to CWIRE-affiliated websites!
We make it easy for you: lots of buttons and banners from which to choose, and the code is spelled-out for you. If you post a link to CWIRE on a webpage somewhere, sign the CWIRE Guestbook and let us know! We'll link back to you! Thanks!

-- Robert Marston, Director

URL: http://cwire.com/friends/default.asp
Viewed: 9/7/2008 10:38:21 AM
Last Modified: March 13, 2005 7:21 PM
Source: Robert Marston, Publisher
URLID: 1359