[Nfb-web] Looking for Affiliate WebSite Assistance

[Gary Wunder]

With all due respect to paid positions, should we pay our state presidents,
our newsletter editors, are recording secretaries, our treasurers, and the
rest of the folks who regularly volunteer a significant amount of time?
There is no excuse for treating anyone badly, be they a webmaster or
anything else, but most of us bring the talents that we have, and we turn
them into a donation. At the same time we donate our brains and energy, we
are actively involved in fundraising to secure those things that we can't
hope to get free of charge.

In the NFB of Missouri we have hired several webmasters because we believed
the work to be so time-consuming that it was not reasonable for a volunteer
to take it on. In one case we hired a webmaster whose primary goal was to
make our website accessible but who would not pay attention to visual
criticisms and the suggestion that ones work should be visually observed as
well as audibly red. The second webmaster we hired decided he would convert
our website to Word Press. We talked about the absolute necessity of the
website being accessible both from the perspective of the visiting user and
the person doing the updating. The person we hired assured us that he had
read a good bit about making Word Press accessible, and the content he
generated for us was indeed quite usable. When it came to working with the
content management system, which was one of our major objectives, he
realized that making the website accessible was beyond him. He quit. To his
credit he did not take the second amount of money which was due him on
completion of that part of the project, but getting qualified people is no
easy matter.

Before we decide that being a webmaster is necessarily a paid position with
the NFB, let us consider by what distinction we will divide paid and
volunteer effort, and once we have established a list of paid positions, let
us figure out how in the world we are going to fund them. The mail campaign
is slowly dying; reverse mortgages are taking their toll on estates that
once went to us; telephone solicitation is frowned upon and ever more
difficult. I'm sure that if we all put our minds to tackling this problem,
we can come up with a solution.