Outreach Material Guidelines

Thank you for making outreach materials for NYC Mesh! When making outreach material or working on other projects for NYC Mesh, keep some things in mind:

• The "shelf life" of physical and digital literature given to possible members and volunteers is longer than one might expect. It may be weeks, months, or even a year before someone comes back to a flyer, card, or link you send to them today!
• What would happen if tomorrow, you win the lottery and moved from NYC to Hawaii? Will everything you started with NYC Mesh continue operating as expected while you enjoying life at the beach?

The Problem

The issue is that links added to documents or outreach materials can become out of date over time. This leads to members being directed to pages that 404, or have incorrect and out of date information.
For example, directing people to a hard coded google forms link, vs a NYC Mesh page that embeds or links to the google form. Doing it via the hard coded google link means that we can't later change that link if we need to replace the form later.

Suggestions

1. Share the templates/materials for your awesome new outreach material on the wiki so that others can benefit from it in the future.
2. Only include links within the NYC Mesh organization domains.
   1. For example, include nycmesh.net/your_new_thing or something.nycmesh.net
   2. Do not use external link shorteners.
   3. Ask in #outreach if you'd like assistance setting this up.
3. Prefer to add content to existing sites (such as nycmesh.net) instead of creating new sites.
   
4. Never reference email addresses that do not end in @nycmesh.net
   
5. Make sure NYC Mesh has the rights/license to use any images/artwork included in the outreach material.
   
6. (Future when practical) For email references, request and use shared mailboxes instead of referencing your own @nycmesh.net mailbox. Ask in #outreach if you'd like assistance setting this up.