Compiling an initial list of University staff to invite to join the DIVAS community has been quite a long and laborious process.
It was decided to compile a list of Award leaders as a starting point by possibly consulting the University prospectus's. These did not prove too fruitfull except for the Faculty of Health. I thus decided to consult the University email address book where I was able to locate PAMs (Programme Area Managers) and other likely contacts from their role titles.
I subsequently sent out many emails to PAMs, administration staff, coordinators such as Foundation Degree Coordinator, asking for Award Leader lists and any other possibly interested staff. As a result of this, and including contacts we already knew would have an interest, I now have a list of over 200 staff to receive invitations to the DIVAS Ning Community.
Hamza has compiled an invitation which includes a brief description, instructions on logging in to the community, notification of forthcoming events and a line or two to apologise to invitees who have no interest in validation and ask them to ask colleagues who may have an interest to contact us.
I have compiled a contacts folder in Microsoft Outlook with name and email details of all of the staff who we will be inviting at the beginning of next week. This took about a day to compile - extracting details from emails, attached Word documents etc., looking up emails in the directory and saving them all into a new address folder called DIVAS Contacts. I have done it this way as all we now have to do is:
1. Export the DIVAS Contacts folder from Microsoft Outlook into a .csv file.
2. Use the csv file to batch invite the contacts in Ning which will allow us to select invitees from a csv file.
