We look forward to cultivating a special relationship with membership organizations, non-profits, and government agencies. Your recreational calendars command much of the recreational information within Orange County and you are the storehouse of information about recreational destinations (as distinguished from entertainment destinations such as restaurants, movie theaters, TV, etc.). You are the source of the information in the Good Time Net, and we can succeed only if we earn your cooperation by helping you fulfill your missions.
We have established the following programs to support your missions, and we'll be developing more as we apply our resources to the ideas we sometimes get from you:
Most membership organizations, non-profits and government agencies are surprised at how much trouble it is to maintain their activities calendar on the web. There is nothing challenging about it, yet we have found it to be the leading cause of a website that appears abandoned. We've all seen such websites where the calendars list events from last month. Few things cause cybernauts to delete a website from their bookmarks faster than such signs of demise.
| Here are the three leading causes of such event calendars falling into disrepair: | The Good Time Net can improve on this because: |
| Once the creative geniuses who build your website see it operating in all its glory, they tend to move on to other challenges. Website maintenance rarely presents them with a challenge, particularly the data entry of changing event dates. For a membership organization or a non-profit on a shoestring budget, these are often volunteer webmasters who grow scarce as the task turns to drudgery. | We are specialists at event maintenance on websites. We have developed the tools to automate it, and the policies and procedures to keep your event calendar looking fresh. |
| Events information is often in the hands of the far-flung members coordinating the one or two events they manage. After the novelty of a website wears off, such members sometimes lose interest in providing information to a webmaster unless it is easy to do so. | We have several easy ways your event leaders can keep us posted about their events, including a web-based form, email, fax (714) 369-1693, voice mail (714) 369-1638, ext GTN, and U.S. post. |
| For those organizations sponsoring hundreds of events, such as the Recreation Departments of cities, they soon realize they are trying to manage a database of events with a web editor. A cancelled Children's Swimming Class has to be taken off the calendar, the list of swimming classes, and the list of children's classes. Web editors work like word processors so each change is done manually, unlike databases that can update such lists automatically. | The Good Time Net is a database connected to a website. The database is highly automated to make event management easy and effective, and it connects to a website that dislays it to you. |
The Good Time Net is arranged so you can keep your website looking maintained by just keeping current such largely static information as your mission statement and forms for joining. You link to the web page we assign you on the Good Time Net and that lists all your events, kept current by a company dedicated to it.
At least as important is the amount we promote your event. Besides your members linking to our list of your events, we also pick up prospective members finding your event on the Good Time Net. Each event links to your home page, where you can provide information on joining. Whereas your website may get hundreds of visits per month, ours gets many thousands and they can all find their way to your events. We also see plenty of cross-pollination whereby cybernauts who check our swimming event lists, for example, find their way to a related keyword such as surfing and then get involved in a new sport.
We require only that events be recreational. We have nothing against events to promote a product or service, but we place those under paid advertising. Events must also be in Orange County. They can involve activities outside the county, but then the departure meeting location must be in the county.
Most of you know the hundreds or thousands of dollars web developers want to produce and host a website. For qualified membership organizations, non-profits and government agencies, we offer a program whereby we will develop your website and host it for no money - nothing down and nothing per month.
Our approach to this is that we use a template with sections for your mission statement, how to join, etc. and you provide entries to such sections using an online form and a similar form to modify your website later. This allows us to cut costs by automating the process. The process is appropriate for smaller recreational clubs, less so for larger government agencies (who should do their own custom websites). For such larger organizations, we can show that it is nonetheless cost-effective to have the Good Time Net manage your recreational calendar since it costs you nothing and can even earn you revenue.
Our requirements are simply:
Getting started is as easy as filling in and submitting our online application form.
You are the gatekeepers to at least some of the attention span of your members. No matter how low your budget, you can trade this attention span for money, and as long as you don't promote products or services that corrupt your mission, you can earn revenue to expand your programs and activities. It can take the form of an internet access provider giving your members a sales discount at the same time they give your organization a rebate. This is called an affinity program, and you can read about it in a presentation we were asked to make at the 14th Annual California Trails Conference, or you can send us email and we'll point you in the right direction.
Our Affinity Program relates to ad listings we accept to cover our costs and keep the Good Time Net free to users and event promoters. These ad listings are added to the bottom of event lists such as "Bicycling in San Clemente" and in that case would begin with words such as "Businesses Supporting Bicycling in San Clemente". They can also be added to a destination, such as a restaurant promoting themselves as a meeting place near a trail head. They can also be a sporting equipment retailor with a note at the bottom of a golf class about their sale on golf clubs.
Through our Affinity Program, we share a percentage of the ad revenue with you. We are the ones making the sale. You simply use your existing communication channels to your members or constituents to pass the word about the Good Time Net. Often this is little more than mentioning in your newsletter where on the web your events calendar can be found. Sometimes it's having us give a demo at one of your meetings. You know your audience, the best way to communicate with them, and your policy restrictions - we rely on you to come up with the best approach. The more you commit to putting out the word about us, the higher the percentage of ad revenue we share with you.
For a government agency without a way to put ads on their website, this often represents the only way to generate internet revenue similar to the ads in the quarterly recreational magazines printed by most cities. For all organizations, the Good Time Net represents the only way to eliminate the maintenance cost of online event management and to turn it into a revenue source.
The way to start is to send us email requesting a dialog or to call Peter Shikli at (714) 369-1638, ext 77. After listening to your situation, we send you a written Affinity Program proposal.