We’ve been putting a lot of work recently into communicating with local residents more effectively. Traditionally this has been through our magazine, Kirkstall Matters which editor Jenny Budd is doing a fine job in taking forward. Hopefully if you are a member of the KVCA you should have received your copy of that latest issue delivered by hand, and it is of course available in local outlets.

The other method of communication has been through email updates sent straight from this website, which sends an email after new articles have been posted. This has always been on the website, but has been a bit difficult to configure for what we want and requires KVCA members to subscribe to the email updates separately.

The main problem with this is that the tool we were using (Feedburner) only allowed emails to go out daily and at if we post multiple articles over a few days this can be a bit overbearing. I’m pleased to say that we’ve now moved to a new tool (Mailchimp) which will send a weekly digest of latest articles which I hope is more appropriate. We have some ideas on how to improve this further in the future such as an upcoming events list, and would of course welcome other ideas.

Our aim is to communicate widely with the local community, to let everyone know what is happening, what the issues are that we face as a community, and how you can get involved. To join our new and swish email list, you just need to put you email address in the “subscribe” section of the website. If you are already subscribed for website updates your email address has already been moved over and you should not see any difference apart from the weekly frequency and a new stylish format!

I wouldn’t be able to end this without thanking the (enormously helpful) local Charlotte Walker in showing me the Mailchimp ropes, we’ve been meaning to do this for ages and we couldn’t have done this without her.