One of the pressing items we'll need to address is contacting local businesses for participation / possible contribution to the event.  I think we need to be concerned about a couple of things:

• Multiple contacts to same company
• Contacting companies without providing them a way of opting out of further communications
• Tracking correspondence

We could just use the spreadsheet in gdocs, but as more information gets added to the sheet it becomes increasingly cumbersome.  I could see this list becoming very important to us as a group, and to other companies / individuals in the area.  This event will be the first of many communications we will have with these companies, we need a robust way to maintain this.

I’ve spent some time over the weekend looking at some CMS modules for Drupal, and while they have some nice features (tracking events, handling registrations, etc), they are very complex – I think way too complex for what we want to address.

I would like to throw this out as an option, assuming we have email capabilities from the wnydug.org site.  We used a contrib module called SimpleNews extensively at my prior employer, and it is a very simple way to send and track emails sent to the site users.  It allows for opt-in / opt-out, establishes de-facto templates for different types of communication, and leverages all of the typical Drupal goodness.  We maintained a list of / regularly communicated with over 17,000 email contacts using this setup.

Here is what I propose:

• We use wnydug.org as the container to store this contact information, instead of the current spreadsheet.
• We expand the account settings by adding the additional fields we have in the business spreadsheet to the standard user account.
• We enter a user for each of the businesses, and set up a permissions role for the group
• We can then send email communications to them (may require initial phone call for introduction and to break the ice, could get email contact from that)

I just quickly copied the press release we just created into a newsletter node on one of my sites:

http://www.davidcanfield.com/pr_2014-12_world_class_web_software_expands...

Never mind the [lack of] formatting, I use this site as a sandbox and am continually changing things around, we can dress it up a bit with typical node capabilities.

Let me know if you think this would be an option, I can go into more detail if it is.  I would be willing to set this up if it is possible, as I've done it before and am familiar with the modules.

If we can't use the wnydug.org site I still think we need to come up with a more robust way of storing / tracking this information.