Maybe you’re checking out this list as you amble out of one of the Chapter Leaders Sessions at Excellence in Journalism 2012. Or, maybe you’re a chapter leader who couldn’t quite make it to the conference, but are diligently checking up on everything SPJ while lounging at home in your pajamas on a Saturday.

Either way, here’s the list of helpful web tools that were shared during the session at EIJ12. Did we miss something? Was one of these tools helpful in a way we didn’t mention? Share by commenting below or sending an email – we’d love to hear it!

• Ticketbud - Ticket sales. Organizers pay a flat fee, regardless of the amount of tickets they sell (free events are FREE). Event pages can be customized and can be formatted to include an easy option for sponsorship. Random goodwill fact: any events benefiting cancer are FREE.

• MailChimp –  Easy to use, sharp looking, custom way to send emails to chapter members and other journalists in the community. Great Forever Free plan, which should suit most chapter needs. Plays nice with social media and has an incredibly cute monkey as a mascot.

• A blog – We’ve forever heard from chapters that it’s hard to get a website or blog going, but the reality is that the web is where current and future  members are going to find you. So try any number of these free (with paid options, of course) tools: WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, Posterous, Snackwebsites… the list goes on and on. Something, if regularly updated, is better than nothing.

• Finances are complicated for us as individuals, let alone managing those of a non-profit organization of journalists (who aren’t inquisitive and curious at all…). As a leader, you obviously have to find what will work for your individual chapter, but checking into something like FreshBooks, a cloud accounting service, might be helpful. With this tool, more than one person can “see” the finance situation, creating better checks and balances.

• Meetup.com – Consider listing your chapter and events on Meet Up, a site for people to find connections by interest and location. Also consider using the tool to find similar journalism organizations in your area and suggest a partnership for an event or two.

These are just a few tools that  might help keep your chapter connected and cut down volunteer hours. Do you have a great suggestion? Share it with other leaders by posting a comment or email it!

People packed the Watson Fine Arts Center in San Antonio for the San Antonio SPJ Chapter’s Gridiron performance. Ticket sales yielded roughly $8,500 that the chapter will hand out as scholarships. The chapter summed up the event and thanked notable people on their blog but, even cooler, is the YouTube channel that features videos of some of the spoofs from the show.

Here’s a great preview:

Chapter president Eva Ruth Moravec shared one tool that helped the chapter with the logistics of their event:

www.ticketbud.com – we presold online tickets using this service. It was $40 to set up the event (no cost if the event is free), but that means the fee isn’t passed onto ticket-buyers. The site uses PayPal for transactions and is extremely easy to use. We’ve used it for two events and it’s made things much easier. Customers print out tickets and the organizers can upload a list in Excel and sort by name, etc.

Does your chapter have a helpful tool or tip? Don’t forget to share it!