Windows on the Web:  Econ Videos, Membership Portal Perks

By Bruce Kratofil
NABE Webmaster

NABE took some brave new steps into the world of video at the Washington Economic Policy Conference in March.  We are also taking some new steps with our new membership portal. Both will be covered this issue in “Windows on the Web.”

Instead of Music Videos – Econ Videos

Through the generous sponsorship of the Institute for Economic Competitiveness at the University of Central Florida, the Washington Economic Policy Conference was covered by Convention News Television. The crew from CNTV arrived Sunday night and almost immediately started taping interviews, sessions, and other features at the meeting.

After installing a video player on the NABE website, by Monday afternoon Web visitors were able to see scenes from the conference, including an interview with NABE President Chris Varvares; highlights of speeches by Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker, Council of Economic Advisers Chair Christina Romer, and former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin; panel discussions; and a commercial for the NABE Foundation.

According to the people at CNTV, the commercial for the NABE Foundation has been the most viewed video, followed closely by the NABE Roundtable and then video of the speech by Christina Romer.

Take a look at the videos while they are still up, as they may be taken down in the future. Luckily, an alternative place to view them is NABE’s new channel on YouTube. This means the parody of Glenn Hubbard (Every Breath You Take) won’t be the only meaningful economic content on YouTube.

The Membership Portal

 In the December issue of WoW we started to explain about the new Membership Portal at the website. One thing the portal does is help us maintain the NABE membership database more efficiently. However, the efficiency also benefits you.

The old system on the website had no memory of you. Every time you registered for a meeting, teleconference, or other activity that required payment, you were faced with the same need to log in all your contact information, as well as your credit card information. Even if you wanted to sign up for two separate teleconferences on the same day, you would need to enter all the information twice. That’s because the e-commerce functionality on the site did not remember any members; every transaction was treated as a new one, because the system operated as if it had amnesia.

The new portal is different. The first thing you need to do (and you only need to do it once) is register and create an account, with a new username and password. (The old simple password system, which in reality made it easy to guess usernames and passwords, would be too weak in the new system.) On subsequent visits, as soon as you log in, the system will recognize you and your history with NABE.

Then when you want to register for an event, after selecting and adding it to the shopping cart, you can proceed to checkout where most of your information is already filled in for you. If you want to register for two events, you toss them both into the shopping cart, and only pay once.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

 The new portal also makes it easy to update your own profile, with new work information, new job titles, and the like. Unfortunately, this ease has caused a problem elsewhere.

Before, if you changed jobs or got a promotion and contacted NABE to update your records, the update would have been handled manually by one of the NABE office staff.  They would have made a note of the change and sent it along to the NABE News editor, so that we could have a nice long listing of Member News in each issue.

Now that the updates are handled automatically, no one at NABE may necessarily notice and doesn’t know to tell the NABE News editor, so we are left with a very skimpy Member News section.

So help us out.  If you get a promotion, a new job, have a new baby, or have a daughter anchor a campus news show, let us know and we will help spread the word.