Registering your service project(s), enables Youth Service America to highlight your project through the Global Youth Service Day media campaign, and share your efforts with other GYSD volunteers. Thousands of local partners and organizers just like you are planning projects that address important community needs.

Even if you have just begun to plan your project, go ahead and register, so that we can begin to share these materials with you. You can always log back in and update your project if the details change.

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Step 1: Creating an account

Click "Create new account" on the lefthand side of the screen. You'll get to a page where you will type in your "username", which must only be letters, numbers, and can include periods, hyphens and underscores. This is the name most people will see as identifying you and/or your organization, so it should represent one of those.

You will need to supply a valid, working email address.

You will be asked to provide a name and website information for the organization you represent as well as it's office location. Please do not enter your event location details in this field -- If you do not represent an organization or group, leave this blank

Finally you'll have to type in the words you see in the "CAPTCHA" section - this prevents people from abusing the website by using computer to automatically create account and post junk. If you can't read the words, you can press the refresh () button to try another set, or the audio / volume button () to listen to the words spoken to you. As an added benefit, you are providing a small volunteer service by helping digitize books from the Internet Archive and old prints of the New York Times. Read http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html to find out more about how you just helped!

Check Your Email

Now check email account you entered for new mail. Usually you will receive the email almost instantaneously - check your junk mail if not, or contact ict@ysa.org if you haven't found the email within 30 minutes.

The email will provide you a link to click on and an automatically generated password. If you simply click the link you will get to a page which will automatically log you in (once only!), which will let you change your password, as well as create a signature and decide whether to allow other users to contact you through a contact form on your profile page. These are all optional (except for changing the password!). You may also set your time zone to reflect your local time.

If you want to correct or change your organizational information, click on the "Organization Info" tab on the top of the page. You can edit your account by clicking the new option (only available to logged-in users) "My Account" on the left-hand side of the page.

Step 2: Posting an event (part 1)

After logging in, you should see a new menu item on the left; "Post a Global Youth Service Day Event," or visit http://www.gysd.org/add and select the global region where the event will take place.

Event Name

The name of your project or event - keep it short, but specific. "Beach Cleanup" is OK, but "South Bay Beach cleanup" is better. "South Bay Beach Cleanup hosted by South Bay Beach Club at 10AM on April 24 supported by the local chamber of commerce" is way too long (but would make a great first sentence for the description!)

Detailed Event Information

Media contacts, local officials, and potentially even representatives of funders will be looking at this map and may decide to visit your event - having accurate information regarding times that the event is actually happening is very important.

The information here is vitally important for you to promote your event. If things change, remember that you can log back in and update this. First, please specify which days your event occurs on.

Second, provide specific dates and times for the event or celebration.

Good:

April 24: 9am-3pm
April 25: 11am-3pm, with a celebration from 4-6pm in the auditorium at Middlebury School, 123 Main St., Anytown, ST.

In case of rain, the event will take place at the alternate location, Middlebury School, 123 Main St., Anytown, ST.

Bad

All day over the weekend. If it rains, meet at the school

This entry would create more questions for people not familiar with your event (like the media and public officials!) than it would answer -- What does "all day" mean - 9am-5pm? 8am-4pm? 5am-5pm? Which school? Where is it?

In the "Day-of Information" box, add any tips, tricks, suggestions and requirements that volunteers, media, public officials, community members and so on need to know, such as specific directions to the site (walking, public transit, complicated or tricky driving directions?). Other things that could go here would be dress code (are volunteers going to get dirty cleaning a beach or be presenting findings in business-wear to the City Council?), or any gear to bring (hammers and gloves? shovels? laptops? flip-charts?)

If you are participating in Martin Luther King Day ("A Day On, not a Day Off") please check that and submit a project registration at the http://my.MLKDay.gov website.

If your event is a Semester of Service bridging MLKDay to GYSD with a semester-long service project, please specify that and put in the details for the GYSD culminating event or celebration. This field is very important.

Event Description

Here is where you get to add all the details. First, though, try and sum up the entire event in one sentence; e.g. "Youth learning about local environmental stewardship clean local river bank and present their research to City Council."

If we are able to promote events through Twitter, SMS, or other "short" updates (like Facebook statuses, etc.) this short sentence is key.

After that quick summary, feel free to post all the information you'd like with webpages, details, and so on. You can click "Split summary At cursor" to specify where your introductory summary (ideally, the first, short sentence) ends and the detail begins. It will separate what comes before your cursor ( | ) from the rest (but you can re-join it later!)

"Vocabularies"

This content area contains three boxes you can help categorize your event with - Issue areas, GYSD Grantees, and other Service Events. Scroll through each one and click (ctrl+click to select multiple items) all which apply to your event. Please do not go overboard - if a topic does not directly apply to your event, don't select it please.

Location

If you are in the United States or Canada, the map will be able to place your event from your street address, city, state, and postal code, so there is no need to click on the map or enter your latitude and longitude.

If you are NOT in the USA or Canada, please click on the map in your country and continue clicking to refine your location until you have found where your event will take place. Alternatively, if you know the coordinates of your event (Latitude and Longitude) you can type those into the boxes below the map. You can click and drag the map to move it, use the zoom + / - buttons on the top left of the map, or select the "Hybrid" mode which overlays roads over satellite imagery to help you find your project's location.

Once you click on the map, the system will put in a latitude and longitude value based on where you clicked. If you are in the USA or Canada, and clicked the map by accident, please delete these values, as they will override your address and your project will show up on the map wherever the red map marker shows!. Your map marker will not show up from your address until after you've saved your event.

Submitting your Event

Once done, press the submit button - you'll see a summary of your event, and if your address was converted into a map point, you should see a latitude and longitude listed under the location information.

You can go back and click on "Post a Global Youth Service Day Event" to add another event, log out, or close your browser - it's saved and in our queue for review! Thanks!

Step 4: Seeing your event

Currently, events go into an approval queue before they appear on the map. We may change this, but for now it will take a few days before your event appears on the public map.

At any time, however, click on My Events to see a list of all of your events (published or not). (A short list should show up if you're logged in)

Step 5: Editing your event

To edit your event, simply log back in and visit My Events to see a list of all of your events (published or not). Click on their title to see the full listing of the event, and then click the edit tab to update the information.