We use Campaign Monitor extensively at the IB and we think it’s great. One thing that is often an issue for us, working in offices all round the world, is training new users. Even though it’s a simple system to use, not everyone has the time or patience to figure everything out without help.
Thanks to Digett video we can now refer people to Youtube for help!
The banners and buttons below are available to all IB World Schools. They will allow you to create a link from your school website to your page on www.ibo.org. By placing one of these banners/buttons on your website it will allow visitors to confirm that you are an official IB World School.
Copy and paste the code for your chosen banner or button into your web page. IMPORTANT – You must change the “XXXXXX” in the first line of code to your IBIS school code (the one used for your school’s page on the IB website). If this is not changed then the link will not work.
Please do not edit or resize the banner. If the banner does not fit your website, please consider using one of the buttons instead. If you have a special request, contact us for assistance.
Riverwood International Charter School have put a link right on their homepage.
Contact us to share your good examples here.
We need to add two more languages to our blog network, French and Spanish. In most cases, this will simply be a case of providing entirely separate blog content, but in a select few we’ll have a requirement to pass English text to our translation department for like-for-like translation into French and Spanish. In these cases we’ll need:
While this may be easily achievable, we’re only just about to embark on it. Any suggestions for great plug-ins or words of warning would be gratefully received!
Watch this blog for news of how we get on.
Logging-in will take you to your ‘Overview’ screen. This screen shows all the campaigns you are currently working on, as well as campaigns you have recently sent. From this screen, choose the following option:
On this page you need to do the following:
When you’re done, click ‘Next’.
This page allows you to select the format of your campaign. You have three options:
For the purposes of this demonstration, choose one of the templates. When you’re done, click ‘Next’.
This page allows you to add and edit content.
The icons on the page allow you to edit and delete existing items, as well as to add new items.
Some areas of the page cannot be edited and will update automatically, such as the menu under ‘In this issue’ which is created from every title you add.
You can cut and paste content directly into any of the screen areas. When you cut and paste content you will be asked to create a plain text version as well. The plain text version may require some formatting to ensure it fits onto the recommended screen size and that it’s formatting is appropriate.
Adding new sections happens automatically when you hit ‘Add new item’. You should try and work with this format wherever possible, to keep the presentation of IB newsletters consistent and recognisable. If you have absolutely unique requirements, contact web@ibo.org
Adding images is managed automatically and images are resized in order to keep the filesize small. If you require bigger images, contact web@ibo.org
Some changes can be made directly in the HTML of the page. If you don’t feel comfortable working with HTML, contact web@ibo.org
When you have added your content, click ‘Preview’ to see how your newsletter looks.
If you’re happy with this, click ‘I’m done, return to the snapshot’.
If you need to make more changes, click ‘Make more changes’.
For the purposes of this tutorial, we’re going to ‘Snapshot’ next.
This page is your campaign homepage. From here you can preview and edit both HTML and plain text versions of your email.
Click ‘Define recipients’
This page shows all the subscribers you can send to. Subscribers can be added via pre-existing lists, or individually. Adding lists requires a seperate tutorial, but is easily done via CSV files.
Select the subscribers you want to send this email to and click ‘Next.
This will return you to the Snapshot screen.
From the snapshot screen, you will need to click the ‘Test and define delivery’ button. From this screen you can send a test version of the email to yourself and as many approvers are required.
Send yourself a test email every time!
When you receive your test email in your inbox, and are happy with it, click ‘Next’.
You now have the option to either send your campaign immediately, or to schedule it for future delivery. This is useful because you can stagger your email delivery times. For example, you might want to create an email on Friday afternoon that needs to arrive Monday morning. Simply set the scheduled delivery time for Monday morning and the system will do the rest. Certian times of day achieve better open and read rates than others, check your campaign analytics to see what works best for you.
When you’re done here, click ‘Send campaign’ and you will be taken to the payment screen.
The final screen allows you to pay for your campaign. Enter credit card details and you’ll be charged and the campaign will be scheduled.
Remember: if you are importing a lot of new subscribers, you will have to wait for your list to be approved. This is to avoid sending to subscribers whose details we are not allowed to use. BE PREPARED to wait 24 hours for large amounts of new subscribers to be approved.
Remember: This system has been created for ease of use and general applications…if you have something different to send, contact web@ibo.org
Remember: You should always check you have the latest email lists before you send. Mailbuild will track unsubscribes and avoid sending people information they don’t want, but it will not automatically add new subscribers in external databases.
Remember: You should not send files to hundreds of addresses via email as an attachment. You should always try and upload the file to a website and send a link.
More general advice on creating great e-newsletters is available on the Campaign Monitor website. Campaign Monitor is the new name for Mailbuild.
Not surprisingly, every IB World School wants to let people know that they’re authorised to deliver the IB curriculum.
After going through the Application process, most schools are happy to see their page appear on the IB website…but almost all want to do more.
Well happily the IB store sells a range of promotional materials, from flyers to copies of IB World magazine, but we also offer free online materials.
Follow our step-by-step instructions to linking to your school’s page on www.ibo.org, and if you have any problems following them, ask for help here.
We recently had a request to set up RSS feeds for the search term ‘International Baccalaureate’ from Google news. The feed had to work in English, French and Spanish, to be accessible through a single point of entry for the purposes of news monitoring, and also had to enable distribution through our public website.
First a quick summary (skip to the next section if you’re not inclined to know why it works the way it does!)
RSS is a way for website developers to make the content of a website ‘broadcastable’. When you use an RSS reader you are, to continue the analogy, ‘listening’ for RSS feeds, a bit like a radio listens for radio signals.
To ‘tune in’ to an RSS feed, you don’t need to select a frequency, you need to select a website.
You can add new websites by adding their RSS ‘channel’ to your reader. This is often identified with a small orange RSS symbol on the webpage.
On SOME websites, like Google news, the website is smart enough to allow you to subscribe to a search. This means we can search for incidences of ‘International Baccalaureate’ and subscribe to the results of that search, effectively creating custom ‘channels’.
We need three language ‘channels’, each listening to the Google news website for incidences of “International baccalaureate”, “Bachillerato Internacional” and “Baccalauréat International”.
First, we need to set up three folders in our reader:
We then need to find our channels. In this case we are using the Google news website to create our channels. Google news is multilingual, so we need to visit three language versions of the site:
On each site, we need to search for the appropriate text, respectively “International baccalaureate”, “Bachillerato Internacional” and “Baccalaureat International”. We remove any accents, because the search terms will form part of the URL, and URLs don’t like accents!
When we perform a search for the text above, a set of results will be displayed. It is these results that we wish to subscribe to.
Click the ‘RSS’ icon on the results page and select ‘Subscribe in Google Reader’ OR right-click on the RSS box and copy and paste the URL into Google reader.
We now add each of these language feeds to the folders we created earlier.
Here are the resulting feeds:
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user%2F07097361613443079983%2Flabel%2FEnglish%20feeds
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user%2F07097361613443079983%2Flabel%2FFrench%20feeds
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user%2F07097361613443079983%2Flabel%2FSpanish%20feeds
As you can see, these only share ALL items that are picked up from the search in Google news. We need to be able to further refine these feeds so they only include information we select. We can do this using TAGS.
Obviously, if we want to keep our English, French and Spanish feeds seperate, we can’t simply star them as this would mean our starred items would contain a mixture of English, French and Spanish items. Though this may be useful for some users, it will not be appropriate for all.
To create Language specific news feeds, we will need a way of marking the items we wish to share that does not rely on starring them. To do this we use ‘tags’.
Folders automatically apply their own tag, so we can already identify English, French and Spanish news items. Google reader does not allow you to combine tags (at least, we haven’t been able to find a way to do it), so we cannot simply tag all items ’shared’ and combine that tag with the folder name.
We need to add additional tags, which in this example we will call ‘English shared’, ‘French shared’ and ‘Spanish shared’.
To add a tag to an item in the news feed, click ‘Edit tags’. We added the tags as described above. By tagging an item we can now distinguish it from the other items, and are able to view the following pages:
1) All items
2) All English items
3) All French items
4) All Spanish items
5) All items tagged ‘English shared’
6) All items tagged ‘French shared’
7) All items tagged ‘Spanish shared’ 
All Starred items
9) All Shared items
So, at last, we have an RSS feed of all items of interest, for each of the languages we required.
We can very simply share this information on our website, by going into the ‘Settings’ > ‘Folders and tags’ section of Google reader, and setting our tags to ‘Public’. From this same page, we can click ‘add a clip to your site’ to get a little piece of embeddable javascript that feeds these stories straight from Google to our website.
All that remains is for us to get everyone who needs to review our media coverage set-up on Google reader, to give them brief guidance on how to add new feeds and how to tag items, and the rest will manage itself.
We have embedded these feeds in the language-specific versions of our website, so we now have a simple ‘hands off’ news-management system running for free. This is also a great option for school or association websites who want to feature hand-selected stories from the web on their own sites.
Check out our feed pages here
Give it a go and let us know how you get on!
