By William (Bill) Murray, President & CEO, NCA
Twitter: @Bill_CoffeeAssn

Just today we received an email from one of our member companies – asking if they could refer customers to a recent post on this blog to find information about good single-serve coffee machine maintenance. Yes, please do!

We were delighted to field this question – and would like to encourage all of our members to use our resources.

As an NCA member, your dues help fund all of our work, including our communications. You can help us serve you – and get more bang for your buck, too – by amplifying the NCA’s reach by tapping your own social media channels. 

Here’s how:

• For starters, if you’re on Twitter, please follow @nationalcoffee and retweet as appropriate.
• If you’re on Facebook, go ahead and Like the NCA – share our posts on your own wall as you see fit.
• If you’re on LinkedIn, follow the NCA for updates.
• Join the dialogue here on “The First Pull” with your insightful comments – or even consider writing a guest post.
• Watch your email inbox each Friday for the Coffee Reporter Weekly, a specially curated survey of the week’s coffee-related stories that are informative, thought-provoking and lots of fun.

Over the past year, we’ve taken great strides to increase the NCA’s member value and service. Among our efforts, perhaps most visible are the frequent communications to NCA members and the industry on a wide variety of coffee-related topics. As our influence grows, our web traffic has jumped – up 30% during the first four months of 2015 versus the same period last year. Our social media following is growing, too: Our Twitter followers alone have increased by 60% compared to June 2014.

And this is just the beginning, as we look for new ways engage all of our members.

If you work at a larger NCA member company with a public relations team or agency, please pass this information along to them to add to their professional toolkits. If you’re like the majority of NCA members — smaller in size, but big on enthusiasm (and caffeinated) — please think of our posts, tweets and opinions as a ready-made resource for your own communications.

To tie everything together, we’ll be launching a new website later this year. The all-new platform will spotlight nearly everything we do, categorized through an updated taxonomy and delivered via an adaptive, user-friendly platform that will work on your mobile devices.

In the meantime, we’ll continue to study the science, scrutinize legal and business challenges, and advocate on members’ behalf. And, we’ll keep you up to date on the work we do. Watch for “National Coffee Association” in your inbox, and you’ll see the NCA’s work unfold. And don’t be shy to partner with the NCA to “Like”, follow and otherwise engage as we spread the word on the industry-boosting efforts you help put in motion.

For whatever you might do – and only you can decide what is right for you and your organization – thank you!

Image Credit: John Atkinson