Shawna Jarrett is the only person directly involved with Tidelines who is a paid member of the SIPOA staff. We at Tidelines very much appreciate that the SIPOA gives us Shawna to help us keep going. The truth is, we don’t know what we would do without her.
Shawna has been with the SIPOA for ten years and her job has a far reach. As SIPOA Communications Administrator, she is responsible for the SIPOA website, so all those e-blasts you get come from Shawna, whose responsibilities include the design and editing of the site.
She is also responsible for photography and videography, including production and editing. Graphic design and copywriting is also a part of her milieu, including most of the association’s flyers, posters and brochures. She is also staff liaison to the Communications and Nominating Committees as well as several other SIPOA committees and task forces. Over the past year she has also handled the production and mixing of Tidecasting, the Tidelines podcast. She is one busy woman.
Shawna lists Tidelines Tech Manager as one of her duties. She says she first assumed the role by offering technical support to Warren Kimball’s project of a blog covering the Sense of Place project Seabrook undertook several years ago. Warren wanted to let people know what the SIPOA was trying to put in place so he went to Shawna and Dennis Pescitelli asking them to put up a Sense of Place blog where people could post documents and live updates from public meetings. Shawna put together a simple blog, which was in use for a few months. When Sense of Place concluded, Warren invited Shawna and Dennis to make the blog a permanent part of Seabrook communications
Shawna and Dennis worked closely together to put together a blog which would be easy for readers to use and editors to navigate. Shawna pointed out the efficiencies of building the blog ourselves, as it was cheap and easy to do. Tidelines uses WordPress and it costs $13.00 per month.
Harder to do was overcoming the “I don’t know anything about blogs mentality”. The original Tidelines team consisted of seven Seabrookers, most of whom knew little about blogs. Training sessions for new editors were set up, with Shawna leading the effort. Many times she met with people in their homes so she could help them navigate the blog on their own computers. Not far along, Shawna noticed that editors were training other editors as each one figured out various aspects of the blog and passed it on.
Shawna attends every Tidelines meeting and holds training sessions as needed as new people join the blog team. Her latest additional set of duties includes setting up, recording and editing podcasts, which are a recent addition to the blog. She told us that for one podcast she re-recorded her introduction 27 times at home until she was happy with the result. The first episodes featured various members of the Tidelines team interviewing subjects, with Shawna handling the recording and editing.
However, she did the interviews of various candidates for the POA board herself, which involved tracking down all people running for the board and interviewing them for 5-7 minutes, then editing the resulting recordings into one cohesive episode. It was a good addition to the election process.
Shawna lives in West Ashley with her two children, Frank (6) and Vera (4). She considers herself a tinkerer and a maker, with hobbies that include furniture making, sewing, automotive repair and visual art.
We at Tidelines are so grateful to Shawna not only for her technical knowledge, but her ability to teach others how to use these new technologies. As was said at the beginning, Tidelines wouldn’t know how to get along without her.
—Barbara Burgess
Tidelines Staff Writer