Can ONA share contact information for local members with my ONA Local organizing team?

Since we don’t have a chapter system at ONA, members do not join ONA through a chapter — they are all members directly with the organization. For their privacy, we therefore can’t make member information available to ONA Local organizers. However, under certain circumstances we can email our members in the area for you.

Can ONA email members in my region about my event?

Currently, our membership system doesn’t allow for automatic notifications of Local events happening near our members, and with hundreds of events happening each year our staff can’t send dedicated emails manually for each event. However, in some circumstances we can email our membership lists for you:

• When a new ONA Local group is hosting its first event
• When ONA staff is co-hosting an event with your ONA Local group (usually this happens in coordination with special campaigns or longer workshops)
• When your ONA Local group hosts a meetup at the ONA annual conference, we will send a geotargeted email to attendees from your region

How can I get my ONA Local event listed in ONA’s newsletter, ONA Weekly?

If you post your events on Meetup.com, we’ll get a notification and we’ll add them to our newsletter. If you’re using another site to manage your event (such as Facebook or Eventbrite) you’ll need to notify us about the event. You can do this by emailing comms@journalists.org, meghan@journalists.org and diana@journalists.org. Events published as of Monday, 4 p.m. ET before each issue are included in the newsletter’s “Upcoming Events” section.

How does ONA promote ONA Local events on social media?

Twitter: We post or amplify (RT) ONA Local event information 2-4 times leading up to the date, with timing depending on when it was announced and volume of other events happening around that time. Tip: We encourage organizers to tag the @ONA account in their posts, as it makes it even easier for us to see and amplify the work they’re doing.

Instagram: Every Thursday, newly announced events that were added to ONA Weekly are featured in Instagram Stories (@online_news) with swipe-up links to event pages. Each Story is then saved to the “Upcoming Events” Highlight, which is regularly refreshed to feature only upcoming dates.

How can I share what happened at my event with the wider ONA community?

ONA’s communications team will reach out to you in the lead-up to your event to ask for photos from your event to be featured on ONA’s Instagram account. We’ve also been testing Instagram Stories takeovers for ONA Local groups and have been booking these takeovers via direct outreach to organizers. In the future, we plan to set up a system for people to sign up to host Instagram takeovers on their own, so stay tuned for more. In the meantime, you can check out past takeovers on the Instagram Highlight.

Occasionally, ONA Local groups also produce blog coverage of their events for publication on journalists.org. If you are interested in pitching a recap post or resource for our website, please contact comms@journalists.org, meghan@journalists.org and diana@journalists.org for more information.