Communications Committee

The ministry of PacYM’s Communications Committee is to nurture and grow the “beloved community” by facilitating communication both within and outside of Pacific Yearly Meeting (PacYM), both during and outside of the Annual Session.

Communications Resources

… that are under the care of or somehow connected with the PacYM Communications Committee (also known as “ComCom”)…

See also the Policy Documents section of this page for specific policies related to these resources.

Website

This IS the PacYM website (www.pacificyearlymeeting.org) and it is directly under the care of ComCom.  If you serve in a PacYM role and you wish to have something posted to the website, send your request to <WebsiteEditor@pacificyearlymeeting.org>.

Role-Based Email Addresses

We have re-established role-based email addresses @pacificyearlymeeting.org and have been setting them up for more and more positions within PacYM.  See the Contact Us page for addresses that are currently functional.  If you serve in a PacYM role that does not yet have a role-based email address but would benefit from having one, please contact <AdministrativeAssistant@pacificyearlymeeting.org>.

Communications and Membership Database

The Communications Committee has been hard at work, especially over the past two years (2020-2022), building a comprehensive Communications and Membership Database for the Yearly Meeting.  Among the fruits of this endeavor will be a PacYM-wide directory and various email distribution lists.

The database currently (2022) holds contact information for over 2000 members and attenders of Meetings within PacYM.  This data has been collected in collaboration with local Meetings.  To ensure that your contact information is (or is not) included in the database, ask at your local Meeting or contact <DatabaseManager@pacificyearlymeeting.org>.  If you are concerned about how the database is managed and used, see below under Policy Documents.

PacYM Directory

The first release of the Pacific Yearly Meeting Directory is now available.
Note: The Directory page and the Directory itself (pdf) are both password-protected. This password was shared with Meeting Clerks and Database contact people by email on 11 November 2022. 

Note that the online PacYM Roster gives the names and Meeting affiliations of everyone who serves in any PacYM role (about 130 individuals), but it doesn’t include their personal contact information.  Role-based addresses can be used to reach many of the PacYM officers and committee clerks, however.

Email Distribution Lists

An email distribution list is a technology that allows a person to send an email message to many email addresses at once by sending it to a single group address. Communications Committee creates and maintains email lists using information from the PacYM Communications and Membership Database. These lists are intended to strengthen our community by enabling Friends with similar ministries to communicate with each other and by helping PacYM officers and committees to share important information with the yearly meeting body.

There are two types of email lists: announcement lists, which allow one-way communication of information, and discussion lists, which allow back-and-forth conversation.  Each is described below.

Announcement Lists

Only appropriate PacYM officers, committee clerks, and PacYM employees can send emails to announcement lists, using their official PacYM role-based emails.

PacYM Friends will be included in these lists on an opt-out basis; everyone who has an email address listed in the communications and membership database and has consented to receive emails pertaining to the yearly meeting will be automatically put on relevant announcement lists, with the option to unsubscribe given at the bottom of each message.

Examples of announcement lists include:
– Annual Session attendees
– Monthly Meeting Representatives to PacYM

Discussion Lists

Discussion lists allow anyone who is on the list to send emails to the list. Friends are asked to “clerk themselves” when composing emails to discussion lists, caring for the community by considering whether the content is kind, necessary, true, and relevant to the particular list.

Friends will be included in these lists on an opt-in basis; an appropriate PacYM officer, committee clerk, or employee will send an invitation to Friends identified in the Communications and Membership Database (or otherwise self-identified) as potentially having an interest in participating. Those that do choose to join will then be added to the list, with the option to unsubscribe given at the bottom of each email if they change their mind.

Examples of discussion lists include:
– Issues of peace and social order concerns

Collaborative Tools

Communications Committee has a PacYM Google Workspace for Nonprofits account.  This account will allow us to set up subaccounts for PacYM committees to store their documents (Google Docs, Google Sheets, etc.) and collaborate online.  We encourage PacYM committees that have already set up their own Google accounts privately to transfer their content into a PacYM Google Workspace account so that it can remain property of the committee when the membership of the committee turns over (“institutional memory”).  Contact the Communications Committee for more information on this.

Listservs and Email support for Committees and Groups

Some PacYM committees set up listservs, such as with Google Groups, for communication among themselves (to arrange and confirm meeting times, for examples). Email listservs work by having one email address, such as xyz@pacymgroups.org or abc@googlegroups.com, which sends the intended email to everyone in the group. This makes it easier to ensure that everyone gets the sent message (that someone isn’t inadvertently left off, or that it goes to their correct address), and it also creates an email archive.

Here are some tips if you’re setting up or updating your committee’s listserv:

  • Make sure more than one person is the ‘owner’ in case something happens to one of them or their email account. One option is to ask Communications Committee to appoint a person or account to be your back-up administrator (they won’t read the emails shared within the committee, just have access if need be).
  • Ask the PacYM Presiding Clerk if they want to be on your listserv (this keeps them updated and allows them to easily communicate with your committee).
  • Decide if you want it to be a closed or open group. In the permission settings, make sure that all of your members can send/post. There is an option to allow ‘anyone on the web’ to send messages to the group; there might be a reason you want this, but probably not. You can also make the group visible or invisible in the Google Group listings: unless you want anyone on the web to be able to ask to join, set it to private.
  • If you would like to set up a listserv for a PacYM committee, contact <AdministrativeAssistant@pacificyearlymeeting.org>

Note: The Youth Programs Coordinator maintains the listservs for YPCC, JYM, and CPC.

Reports

The predecessor to the Communications Committee was the Electronic Communications Subcommittee of Ministry and Oversight, or ECSC, established in 2011 (or earlier, perhaps).  Most of the time the work of ECSC was described only briefly within M&O reports.  In a few cases ECSC issued lengthier separate reports.  Linked below are those reports that were issued separately, plus a single document collecting the shorter reports that were embedded in M&O reports.

Policy Documents

All-in-One

The current Website, Data Privacy, Data Breach, Database and Email Lists policies all wrapped into a single PDF.

Individual Policy Documents

Website

Data Privacy

Data Breach

Database

Email Lists

Job Description

See job descriptions page for a formal charter for the Communications Committee.

History: Creation of a new Communications Committee of Pacific Yearly Meeting was authorized at Annual Session 2017 as part of a broader restructuring of PacYM approved in AS Minute 2017-06.  The approved restructuring proposal describes the new committee in the following terms:

[The Communications Committee] could initially be created with the current Electronic Communications Subcommittee of Ministry & Oversight and the Secretariat Committee. As the name states, this committee would be responsible for communications within the Yearly Meeting (electronic and other) and would take on some of the related tasks currently performed by the Assistant to the Clerk (who would serve on this committee ex officio).  Communications Committee would be responsible for the Yearly Meeting’s online presence, including the PYM website, social media and other presences as these are developed. It would also be responsible for the Daily Miracle and the secretariat office duties related to Annual Session.