The Journal of Gift Planning—Off the Page, Onto the Web
Earlier this year we conducted a survey of readers to learn what they like and what they’d like to change about The Journal of Gift Planning. These comments are typical of the write-in response to the survey:
- Excellent journal. Have a number of issues waiting for me to get to them.
- It’s not that I’m not interested; it’s just that I never seem to have the time to read professional journals of any kind. They all stack up in a pile and every year or so I have to just throw them out without reading them.
- It’s the only publication I insist on reading, no matter how long it’s sat in my “in” box at work.
- Good resource, and I always wish I had more time to study the articles (rather than just quickly review them and save copies for later reference).
It may not surprise you to learn that no one wrote, “I sit down and read it from cover to cover as soon as it comes in the mail.” We don’t really expect that, but we do expect that PPP’s investment of time and resources—both staff and volunteer—in one of our most expensive and high-profile products will pay off in a strong benefit to our members.
There are better ways to make information available for later reference, and better ways to spend the very limited time of busy gift planners than to send them on another trip to the recycling bin. To find those better ways, The Journal of Gift Planning is moving off the page and onto the web. The paper is going away, but the resource remains. The online Journal will be more than a PDF of the printed version. We intend to use all the functionality available to us through the web to make The Journal both more timely and more useful.
When The Journal goes online in 2011, we expect to give readers some new opportunities to interact with content, authors and one another. For example, they might:
- Rate and comment on articles, to help build a body of opinion about their accuracy and usefulness.
- Follow links from articles to related resources.
- Contribute to and comment on blogs that will replace regular columns by the board chair and CEO.
- Interact with authors through online chats.
- Participate in polls and other reader response features that help to identify typical and best practices.
As we make the transition to an electronic format, we’ll continue to seek the advice of volunteers like those who have guided The Journal since its first issue in October of 1997. The transition will also be guided by best practices in the association publishing industry. If you’d like to see a great example of an online journal, I’d recommend Educational Leadership (published by ASCD, formerly the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership.aspx
We invite your comments in response to this post. Take advantage of the technology to share your opinion and advice with the PPP board, staff and volunteers who will manage the Journal’s transition from print to web.
The journal is a great resource for the field. In whatever way you publish it, it is the best source, along with your annual conference, for the best thinking in the gift planning realm.
I would prefer the hard copy so I can read it at my pleasure, not huddled over my computer at work when I have other more immediate priorities.
Actually I like to curl up on the sofa with a cup of tea and read it cover to cover.
Oh well, I guess the e-world gives us more but less quality.
I regret this decision to cease publishing the journal. It is more difficult to take an electronic journal and read it over lunch, on the bus, etc. I don’t save magazines, I save articles clipped from magazines in a vertical file system which I have maintained over the past 25 years. When email messages build up, it is easier to clean out all the messages, including the journal.
Less prestige, less usefulness, less relevance – kinda fitting a pattern here in my view. Oh well.