Since we've added member profiles to the Opus Affair site, I've had several people ask me why we don't have profiles for organizations. Is that an oversight or a deliberate decision? It's the latter: we made a deliberate decision to move organizations to the back-burner.
Of course we want to help promote organizations, events, and projects, but we do it by focusing on the people behind them, rather than focusing on the institutions themselves. I like to say that our community is people first, then events, then institutions. Opus Affair is about connecting people with people, whether that's face-to-face or online.
At some point in the future, we are quite likely to create organizational profiles, but they will always take a backseat to individuals.
If you're wondering about organizational profiles, I bet you have events you'd like to promote. We can help you with that. Here's what I recommend...
- Make sure we know about your events. If we don't already have the event on our calendar, then you can suggest the event to us. (You can read more about the kinds of events we're looking for here.)
- Let us know you're involved in the event. Our calendar keeps track of how many members are involved in an event and uses that info to make recommendations to other members.
- Share the event listing with everyone else who is involved in the event, so they can mark themselves as involved, too. The more members that are involved in the event, the more popular it will be on our calendar. (Here's how that works.)
- Last, but probably most important: be active in the community, offline and online. Many Opus Affair members make decisions about what events they attend based on who they know that's involved. If they recognize your face and name from our monthly events or from your profile page, then that's an important way for them to feel connected to the event.
Let us know if you've got any questions or comments about this philosophy.
PS. One more thing: as part of this decision not to have organizational profiles, it is our policy that personal profiles cannot directly represent organizations. That means no logos or promotional images as profile photos and no organization names listed as your name (so my profile can't be labeled "Graham Wright from Opus Affair"). If we spot either of these things, we'll revert the profile back to its previous version or the defaults.
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