Built Heritage News
When volunteer exhaustion drives innovation the results can be powerful. Just ask Catherine Nasmith a dedicated architect based in Toronto who is well known for her unfailing commitment to built heritage. A petite woman with a quick smile and persistence that just won't quit, Cathy Nasmith was struggling to keep ahead of all the issues facing the built environment across Ontario. She was manually tracking newspaper articles reporting on local fights to preserve local buildings and generating original articles on issues in the community. Her in depth analysis coupled with the links and resources she collected were a treasure trove of materials for anyone who shared an interest in local buildings, old or new, in their community.
The burden of collecting, sorting, organizing and then creating a newsletter was taking her up to two days a week. As items rolled in from her online subscribers and other interested readers, material would sit in her inbox until she could get a chance between her many work projects and community commitments to organize the material and send it out on a basic mailing list.
Working with Cathy we took the time to understand her challenges and identify each step in the newsletter creation process. Together we developed a system that allowed anyone to submit items electronically to a website that would publish the content as she approved it. When she was ready, the integrated newsletter function of the website automatically selected new items and ordered them into categories and dates to create a logical and simple flow to the content. Each newsletter is sent using an integrated contacts management database of users and can be edited at the preview stage. As a newsletter leaves the server it is automatically archived on the website and becomes fully searchable. As Cathy says: "My personal technology skills are pretty average, as are most of my audience. Meta Strategies built something that works for us. They are a pleasure to work with. No tech talk, lots of support. The new online tools have saved me a huge amount of time, created a much more useable archive, and a very attractive newsletter."
We aren't the only people who admire the efforts of a dynamo like Catherine. The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada recently admitted her as a Fellow naming Built Heritage News as one of the many contributions Ms. Nasmith has made to Canada. Take a minute to read about her many contributions.
We salute her and are pleased to have played a small part in making Built Heritage News such a success.
