Los Médicos Voladores

Rather than reinvent the wheel and also risk double postings, we've decided to direct all of our "newsy" information to the LMV Facebook Page rather than on the LMV website itself. The procedure for posting such items is as follows:

First some points about strategy:

• With rare exception, news content should not originate in the eNewsletter but rather should be posted immediately after the news-worthy activity occurs (e.g. within a few days of an LMV trip) to the LMV Facebook page (facebook.com/FlyingDocs).
• Instructions are available here for posting photos, videos and narratives to the LMV Facebook page.
• Articles in the eNewsletter should be seen as teasers of a paragraph or two in length (max) with a "Read More..." link to the source article (normally residing on the LMV Facebook page).  A primary objective of the eNewsletter is to generate traffic to the LMV Facebook page and our flyingdocs.org website.

Constant Contact is a very productive tool for authoring and distributing LMV eNewsletters. This article will outline the mechanics of using this tool.

This article will highlight some of the terminology, commands, and functionality of the LMV databases (which deploy the Zoho Creator online database system).

Certain functions below require the "admin" Sign In (request from webmaster). To be certain you're signed in as "admin"... (1) Sign Out of the LMV database... then (2) Sign In with the "admin" signin. Continue to the steps below.

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• Review: Planning & Organizing LMV Trips | Trip Coordination | LMV Database Primer

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• Initiate a New Trip:
  -- review Patients by Village | Villages | Clinic Reports
  -- Open a New Trip (check scheduled trips; then Add)
  -- connect with Village Liaison (Edit to update)
• Generate my Action List by cloning common trip actions
• Monitor/Edit Trip Team (see LMV Database Primer for details):
  -- use Oasis, Mexico or International Trip Planning centers below
  -- pull down Filter to your desired trip
  -- to change a field for one person, click Edit to the left of that row
  -- to change the same field for a group of people, check the box to left of each... click Bulk Edit... select field, select new value, Apply
• Dues Current? (note: the Dues Current column comes from the LMV Roster record, but not all chapters have up-to-date Roster records; in doubt, check with your Membership chairperson) | Dues Status*
• Trip Waivers in?... for both traveler & pilot... make sure the "I so certify (pilot)" is completed | All Dates | General Release
• Pilot Records are current?
• Trip Expenses paid? (ask chapter Treasurer to auto-forward PayPal emails)

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• Oasis Trip Planning (financials, travel/lodging/emerg-contacts, actions, itinerary, paste into email blast)
• Mexico Trip Planning (recent clinics, financials, lodging/emerg-contacts, actions, itinerary, eAPIS data*)
• International Trip Planning (travel, financials, lodging, passports*)

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• Clinic Coordination | Clinic Forms

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• Trip Report (edit Pilot Reimbursement report to add Clinic data -- one Trip Report per healthcare discipline... for commercial-flight trips, just submit a Clinic Report for each discipline)

We'd love to have you provide a link on your site to Los Médicos Voladores.  Just provide the following code snippet to your webmaster:

<a href="http://flyingdocs.org">Los Médicos Voladores</a>, the flying doctors.

First we'll assume that your event falls into category 1 or 2 below:

1. dealing with one or more of the LMV chapters (e.g. corporate meeting, chapter meeting, fundraising event)
2. dealing with a trip to an LMV destination (trips to Mexico, Latin America, within California)

First a question... are you wanting to announce something that occurs on a given date or range of dates?  Then this is primarily a Calendar Event and you'll want to first create that event by following the article I want to post to the LMV Calendar.  You can return to this article once you've created the event if, and only if, you also want a News blurb to bring extra attention to your event.

Request "Author" Access to the LMV Website

Fill out the contact form including the following information:

• your contact information (especially email) in the message section, list which areas of the LMV website for which you'd like to author articles.
• we'll then create for you a username/password that provides access for submitting News Articles to the site and notify you of same

Our plan is for each chapter to get it's own PayPal account. This way online payments (dues renewal, payment for trip expenses) will go right to the chapter PayPal account, and thereafter to the chapter bank account. And PayPal is relatively inexpensive...for non-profits... no upfront, no annual, just about 2% per transaction.

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