Here is a handy-dandy Village Contacts Excel Spreadsheet. You can use this to enter your contacts and e-mail it to Ryan or Andrea. You need something that can open a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet file. I recommend Google Documents or OpenOffice, both of which are free and wonderful.
There have been some questions about why we are collecting names in a database (well, a spreadsheet to be exact). There are two reasons:
1. Lots of us know the same people. It would be silly (and potentially annoying) if various members of the community sent the same (or nearly the same) letter to the same person. Also, we might have different addresses for the same people, and tracking names and addresses in a database makes it easier to identify potentially out-of-date information.
2. We want to be able to track who has been sent a letter, who has responded to a letter, who has been thanked for a gift, and so on.
So, if you are planning on sending a Village letter, please at least provide the names of those to whom you are sending letters. If we notice that someone else in the community is sending to someone of the same name, we can contact you so you can work out who will send it (or if you want to send it jointly).
Again, you can provide names via the Excel spreadsheet template or via the online data entry form. It's up to you.
Thanks! |