2009 Gift of Giving cover

Job losses and the economic recession have had a devastating effect on families and children in Orange County. Growing numbers of people find themselves in need of basic necessities – food, shelter, clothing and other critical services. What is being done to lift up our neighbors in need? And what can we do to help?

The Orange County Register’s annual Gift of Giving section provides some inspiring stories to that end, as explained by local nonprofit agencies making a lasting impact on people’s lives. The section includes descriptions of families in need, volunteer opportunities during the holidays, and explains how you can join other volunteers and donors to make a difference in our community.

A 20-page print edition published in the Register today, with an introductory message from Register Publisher Terry Horne. The online edition invites you to share your own stories on how you give, and includes some impressive illustrations submitted by readers as part of a recent “design the Gift of Giving cover” contest.

While its Nov. 18 publication date coincides with the upcoming holiday season, the Gift of Giving section is also published on National Philanthropy Day. Copies of the section were distributed at the 24th Annual National Philanthropic Day Awards Luncheon, held earlier today at the Anaheim Marriott. The event was hosted by the Orange County Chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, and was presented by The Orange County Register.

About 100 communities throughout the country celebrate this day by honoring the individuals, businesses and groups that enhance their communities through philanthropy. And you thought it was just an ordinary Wednesday!

Thanks to all of the participating charities, sponsors and readers who contributed to raising awareness for critical needs in our community through the Gift of Giving section!

Post from: Inside the OC Register

Ask that same question to the eight children’s charities selected as beneficiaries for The Orange County Register’s 2009 Season of Caring campaign, and they’ll be quick to answer: Provide after school tutoring for more kids. Connect parents of children with disabilities to specially trained teenagers who have an interest in working with disabled children. Cover costs for pediatric equipment at a Laguna Beach clinic that provides urgent-care services for kids, but completely lost its government funding this year. Those are gifts that will make a lasting impression.

As the Register begins telling personal stories of children (and the nonprofit agencies that serve them) this Sunday, I encourage you to give them a read and contribute to the campaign. The stories will run in the Register’s Local section from Nov. 15 to Jan. 3 on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays, alongside an invitation to donate to the campaign.

Whether it’s $5 or $500, you can help support some very tangible “dreams” in the community and make them a reality. With economic conditions what they are, there’s an even bigger need to lend a hand to children who need our support.

Eight charities were selected to receive funds from the 2009 campaign, and were announced by our partner, Costa Mesa-based Festival of Children Foundation, last month.  100 percent of the funds raised will go directly to the eight charities.

Related stories:

• Make an online donation to the 2009 Season of Caring campaign
• Community leaders climb aboard a carousel for a good cause
• Season of Caring charities named
• Dream on: Beneficiaries of ‘The Possible Dream’ announced

Post from: Inside the OC Register

A special thanks goes out to PrideMark-Everest Insurance Services and Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company, who presented a $15,678 check yesterday to the Orange County Fire Authority as a grant to promote fire safety and prevention.

Orange County Fire Authority is directing this contribution to Register In Education (RIE), which provides local teachers with learning tools and copies of the Register to utilize as living textbooks.

The Register published its fifth annual Fire Safety guide (pictured at left, and downloadable here) on Oct. 7 during National Fire Prevention Week. The 12-page section is one of RIE’s primary educational tools, and is distributed to local schoolchildren in addition to running in the paper. It includes important information on how to protect homes from fires, safety tips, and preparing for earthquakes and emergencies.

The section has cool drawings, a maze, word search and connect-the-dots elements so kids can learn and have fun at the same time.

This local grant to Orange County Fire Authority, and other financial contributions from sponsors like the National Fire Sprinkler Association, makes it possible for the Register to produce this section.

A heartfelt thanks to these organizations for supporting our local firefighters and keeping our community safe!

Thanks to the folks at PrideMark-Everest Insurance Services and Fireman's Fund Insurance Company for their support of fire safety, prevention and education

Post from: Inside the OC Register

The change of seasons isn’t as dramatic in Orange County, and I’m ok with that. While picturesque, I’ve done my fair share of raking and shoveling snow.

As a kid, I’d occasionally turn a chore into an adventure by raking a big pile of leaves together and diving in headfirst with a Nerf football in tow, thinking I was Walter Payton breaking through a stingy defensive line.

We experienced our own distinct “change of season” at Orange County Register Communications today, with the official launch of our new OCRegister.com site.

Today’s launch was a massive undertaking, and hundreds of associates have worked tirelessly during the past several months to make it happen. It was akin to raking 200,000 piles of leaves together (as in 200,000 Web pages from our old site, and transitioning them into a new design and publishing platform). And now the fun part begins: we’re encouraging our community to jump in.

Much like a good snow shoveling, we’ve also tried to clear the path to useful content with a cleaner-looking design, one that helps the community navigate through our site a lot easier.

Everyone involved in “raking the leaves” received some much-deserved recognition this morning from OCRC and Freedom leaders at a launch celebration in our newsroom (click on the related video below).

The new site is one milestone in our company’s vision to become a leading provider of local information, and to deliver news and information through interactive platforms that empower our users. But our work is not done.

We’re always looking for your feedback on how we’re doing. So please take a moment to share your thoughts on the new site in the comments area below, or through our new site overview and FAQ page.

Post from: Inside the OC Register

More importantly, we hope it’s a big day for people we serve in the Orange County community. Did you like what you saw when you logged on to the site this morning? If so, it only gets better.

Beyond a cleaner-looking design, the new OCRegister.com allows you to customize your home page by topics you’re interested in or the cities where you live and work.

Want to learn more? Check out the links below, and be sure to tell us what you think in the comments area below!

Related links:

• How do I enable home page personalization?
• Launch of new OCRegister.com (News Release)
• Hyper-local community pages (News Release)
• Local business directory listings (News Release)
• Key elements of new OCRegister.com site (previous blog posts, published during beta test phase)

Post from: Inside the OC Register

Financially, however, most have tightened their belts. The “second helping” of advertising dollars is limited or simply not there.

Businesses large and small realize how important it is to advertise during the peak holiday-shopping season to increase sales, awareness and traffic (to their locations and Web sites), but the recession necessitates a very meticulous approach in how and where they spend their marketing dollars.

Hundreds of smaller businesses – the entrepreneurs or mom-and-pop retailers without multifaceted ad campaigns, marketing budgets, media buyers or ad designers – have utilized the Register’s ExpressAds platform, a Web-based, do-it-yourself tool that offers cost-effective means of placing ads and targeting newspaper readers in specific communities where they operate their businesses. Individuals also utilize the ExpressAds tool to place Celebrations ads – weddings, anniversaries, birthdays and the like). Both have ready-made ad design templates to choose from, based on the business or Celebrations category they select.

Speaking of birthdays, OCRegister.com/expressads celebrates its one-year anniversary today. In the weeks before this milestone, we invited advertisers who have utilized ExpressAds to participate in a survey to learn more about their experiences with the tool and whether it led to an effective end result.

Here’s a snapshot of what we learned and advertiser comments:

• 85 percent said they would use ExpressAds in the future to advertise again
• 90 percent said they would recommend ExpressAds to other businesses
• More than half (54%) of survey respondents said they had “an excellent experience” using ExpressAds
• 34% had “a few issues, but a positive experience overall”
• 31% said “convenience” motivated them to use ExpressAds, 15% noted “price” and 46% chose “price AND convenience”
• 64% placed their ad through ExpressAds without needing any help or customer support (real-time chat, e-mail, phone)

Some advertiser comments from the survey:

• “Very easy and straightforward. Would like the option to change colors (in ad templates)”
• “It was really easy to use. I had no issues.”
• “Easy. No problem with sizing, but the proof needs to be bigger.”
• “It was a nice system, but it did not match up exactly for what I wanted to do.”
• “It took some time to learn how (ExpressAds) operates. Once I understood the rigid structure, I was able to complete an acceptable design”

Do you have any questions about this tool? We invite you to share them in the comments area below.

Post from: Inside the OC Register

Photo by Leonard Ortiz, The Register

Photo by Leonard Ortiz, The Register

Ygnacio Nanetti found himself in familiar surroundings in the Register newsroom, facing one of the biggest assignments of his life: kissing his new bride.

Nanetti and his new wife, Jill Vandercook, tied the knot shortly after 3 p.m. today as part of a casual ceremony in the Register newsroom. It was a long yet romantic journey to marital bliss for Ignacio and Jill, who met 44 years ago. The Register’s Tom Berg wrote a great story last week about how they first met, began dating, broke up, lost touch, reconnected (with help from Jill’s daughter) and recently fell in love.

With more than 40 years working as a newspaper photographer (including 38 with the Register before retiring in 2007), Nanetti has photographed earthquakes, Academy Awards ceremonies, Super Bowls and countless other major news events for the Register. So one could argue he wanted to pay tribute to his life’s work during his wedding ceremony. But is that why he selected the Register as his somewhat unorthodox venue of choice?

“Everybody kept saying not to have a fancy wedding,” Nanetti said. “We considered eloping, but then you exclude your family and friends who want to be there. I have a lot of friends in the Register newsroom, so I brought the wedding to my friends.”

Ygnacio and Jill plan on spending three days in Newport Beach this weekend as a prelude to their official honeymoon – a cruise to Hawaii – next year.

About 20 family members joined a small group of employees – a mix of close friends and curious onlookers – for the ceremony. In celebration of their big day, Ignacio’s former colleagues posted photos and video of the ceremony on ocregister.com (hey, what better way to honor a fellow photojournalist?).

For the remainder of the day, the comments area of the Inside the OC Register blog will officially transition into an online wedding guest book! Whether you attended or simply watched our coverage of this ceremony, you are invited to utilize the comments box below to share well wishes, congratulations and any words of wisdom.

Ygnacio and Jill in 1966 leaving for a night at the Hollywood Bowl. Nutcracker and swan lake.

Related Links

:

• Can love blossom after 42 years apart?

Post from: Inside the OC Register

• The most frequently visited page on the beta site, besides our home page, is the SIGN IN page explaining the new features of the site and how to enable home page personalization.

• The new site has received nearly 40,000 page views in four days with 600 comments, suggestions and questions coming in to our Customer Service staff.

Overall, feedback has been overwhelmingly positive (about 10 percent has been negative - which is helpful too, as it gets us closer to ways we can improve the site). You like the cleaner-looking design and have told us it’s easier to find specific content, especially local news about a particular city.

Here are a few random comments, good and bad, that you’ve shared this week:

Positive:

-”Certainly I like the idea of my own home page. Looking forward to the new layout. Thanks!”

-”So much easier to use! The categories are much more visible and easy to get around.”

Negative:

-”The new site is too long to scroll, does not give enough information at a glance, and I do not like it. The current one is just fine. Do not fix what isn’t broken.”

-”I don’t like it. It is more difficult to navigate. My main reason for going to the web site is to get local news, now there seems to be very little local news on the site.”

What do you think? Visit our HELP page on the beta site for a list of feedback options (email, chat, phone, etc.), or publicly share your comments below through this blog.

Post from: Inside the OC Register

True story: I once owned a pair of cheesy “blue blocker” sunglasses (resembling the ones pictured at left) that I had purchased at the top of the Stratosphere in Las Vegas. I bought them for about $10 in a gift shop and they were laughably unfashionable, which is partly why I bought them. I also needed something as I prepared to go out onto their sunny outdoor observation deck. Once I boarded the rooftop free-fall roller coaster (a la Supreme Scream at Knott’s Berry Farm or Twilight Zone Tower of Terror at Disney’s California Adventure), I really didn’t care if the glasses offered complete UVA and UVB protection.

Some five years later, in the spring of this year, those sunglasses mysteriously disappeared. I last saw them in my car, which makes me wonder if someone couldn’t resist and had to loot them out of my ride (maybe it was my wife trying to do me a favor).

If in fact such a horrendous crime against humanity had been committed and reported to my neighborhood Sheriff’s department, it would now show up on a new crime map within the community pages of the OCRegister.com beta site. I can now literally look at the street where I park my car and see if a crime has been committed there in the past 24 hours - and it’s updated every 5 minutes.

It’s one of several examples of how we’re upgrading our local coverage to “hyperlocal.” So what does that mean, exactly?

Quite simply, it means we’re transitioning from being content creators to content curators. If we’re not covering the story or producing the information, we’re teaming with those who are and hosting the information on our new community pages.

You’ll find local traffic maps, school ratings, business directories, events, discussion forums, Flickr photo groups and plenty of other cool stuff.

The new community pages are organized in regional clusters, and accessed within the LOCAL NEWS content box on the OCRegister.com beta site. By the way, you can fully customize this box on the beta site so it displays information about cities that interest you by clicking the EDIT icon along the top right of the content section.

Earlier this year, we tested hyperlocal features on our new community pages in the cities that encompass the Saddleback Valley: Laguna Hills, Mission Viejo and Lake Forest. Readers dug it, and views to those city pages nearly doubled. So we decided to build about a dozen more just like it across the county!

As you can tell from my recent blog posts, we’re in full-scale reinvention and expansion mode on OCRegister.com.

One could say our online future is so bright, we’ve gotta wear shades (as long as it’s not the blue blockers pictured above)!

Post from: Inside the OC Register

Our new “personalize your home page” capability is pretty awesome. If you like to catch up on the latest headlines first, then inspect a few favorite sections (Local News, Sports, Business, etc), this new site is for you.

With personalization, your Web-browsing life is now a lot easier because you can deliver your favorite content - local information from our site and any other outside sites you like that have RSS feeds - front and center onto your ocregister.com home page. It brings your favorite stuff to one place, instead of surfing multiple sites.

Here’s how it works: click the orange PERSONALIZE THIS PAGE tab beside the main headlines area (right side of the home page). Decide what you want to keep or add on your home page, and click submit. You may also use black arrow icons located at the top right of each of the content section boxes (Sports, News, etc).

You can also edit settings within each content section – increase/decrease number of headlines within that box, the type of topics appearing within the section, minimize the section so only the box header shows on screen or delete it altogether. Another cool feature is the ability to shuffle the top-to-bottom order in how your content boxes appear, by clicking and dragging them up or down the page.

Here’s an example on how you create a new section: say you like following the Chicago Bears. You can add Chicago Bears as a new section, and feed in headlines on the ocregister.com home page that post to chicagobears.com. Just copy the RSS feed link (usually seen as an orange icon on your favorite Web sites), then paste it within the “Add News from other Sites” box within the PERSONALIZE THIS PAGE tab. Done!

This example isn’t random, by the way, it’s how I’ve customized my ocregister.com home page! I’ve also added RSS feeds from our own site onto my home page for Anaheim Ducks blog coverage , O.C. Business News and Morning Reads (great place to read good news).

Need some more information before testing out the personalization for yourself? Refer to this ocregister.com video demonstration and FAQ page.

Come back tomorrow morning for more details how we’re reinventing how we deliver local information about your Orange County neighborhood.

Post from: Inside the OC Register