14th Annual California Trails Conference
Caucuses
on relevant trail matters
March 22, 1997, noon
by Peter Shikli
We've all heard about the many things available on the internet that may be applicable to membership groups with a recreation mission: calendars of activities, environmental calls to action, online enrollment, interpretive information such as the alarm screeches of ground squirrels, videos of bicycle safety, and the list goes on and on. Unfortunately the budgets of such groups do not. The approach of a company establishing an internet presence where they stand to sell millions of dollars worth of products, services, or image is radically different from the approach of a local hiking club with a few hundred bucks in annual revenues. Your mission may be more beneficial to the community or the environment, but I suggest you look first at what is cost-effective, and that is what we will talk about here.
First, begin by discarding the urge to buy hardware or software to ramp up to the technology. It is common wisdom among computer store salespeople that you buy your way into new technology. If you or one of your members have a 386 or a Mac with a modem, you're ready to begin.
Begin by getting access to the internet. This gives you the ability to find information on the web that is relevant to your organization, to send email to your members, friends and enemies, and lots more. It is called dial-up access and is available from dozens of vendors in your area at under $20/month. I recommend you find a small, local company with good tech support and local, Zone-1 phone numbers within the area of your membership. Check with your phone company for Zone-1 prefixes which you can call for free from your home. There are several companies which have Zone-1 calling prefixes for all of Orange County, and the same is true for most counties.
Next you decide that you will not pay the $20/month, in fact, you will arrange internet access on a net revenue basis. $20/month isn't a lot, but it is $240 for a year, and that is a lot of annual membership fees. Here is a better idea. Propose an "Affinity Program" to the internet access provider of your choice. Request a free access account in return for which you will mention them to your members as the place members can turn for their personal internet access. Moreover, the deal includes a 10% commission off the published internet access fees to be rebated to your group. Since internet access costs are priced the same across most vendors, your group's members realize they may as well sign up through your Affinity Program since their organization gets something out of it. Given how the internet access vendor gains customers without the usual marketing costs, the vendor wins, too - in addition to supporting a worthwhile group. If you can't find an internet access provider in your area who will go along with this, call me and I'll give you the name of at least one that may.
Here's a tip about making yourself independent from internet vendors who may give you a good deal to get access to your members, but then lose their enthusiasm. Go out and get a domain name. Your internet access provider knows what that is and will take care of the details, but expect to pay a total of $150. You then get to own your internet address and could switch internet access vendors by simply transferring your email address. Your email keeps coming and going without anyone noticing the change. Note that this is different from using a domain name for your home page - that is more expensive and may not be worth it for smaller, less flush organizations.
Step one after you get internet access is to tell your members and find out how many of them have internet access at work or at home. In Orange County, this is about 30% and growing at 10% a month. You should switch those people over to getting newsletters and notices via email. Your members like it because it's faster, and you'll like it because it's free - no collating, postage nor dead trees. Your email software allows you to push one button to send a bulletin to all active and prospective members, or just those signed up under an area of interest, for a committee, or on a trip.
Although such email bulletins do not give you a way to include fonts and graphics, I submit that much of the graphics and fonts on newsletters may be cosmetic, something you have to do to keep your newsletter from looking amateur, but doing little to enhance content (with obvious exceptions). With email, you can't be compared to the fancy layout of our better-funded glossy magazines, but rather to email layout. This means membership organizations can focus on producing content (in a few minutes) and push the button to communicate the bulletin. If graphics are essential, the email message can contain the website reference and most modern email software allows you to click on it to load your browser to have a peek.
Only after you have this underway should you turn your attention to developing a website for your group. The leading cause of failure of the website of a membership group is an unwillingness to keep it simple. The internet champions within your organization will push for the bells and whistles to make your website engaging and entertaining, to exploit the full potential of this emerging technology. Volunteers may eat the development costs in their ardor, but maybe not the hidden maintenance costs six months later, at which point you may not yet be online since the volunteers are still building a showcase of technical curiosities.
Subscribe instead to the notion that the total and rapid success of a small project is preferable to the partial and eventual success of a large project. Begin your website with only two sections, "Who We Are" and "How to Join". The Who We Are Section should include simple text about your mission and your activities, and the How to Join Section should give phone numbers, email addresses and two online forms - a membership application form and a form to join one or more interest groups to which you will send electronic bulletins via email as described earlier. The latter should be free since communication now costs you nothing, and is also a way to maintain visibility in front of prospective members. People pay the membership fee to join your activities or to pool resources, such as for trail maintenance or to promote an environmental cause.
Regarding the application form, be aware that taking membership fees via online credit card transactions are probably too expensive and complicated for you to deal with. I can go into the details, but you should consider either calling the new member after they've submitted their online membership form (to have a human welcome them aboard and ask for a credit card number), or just give them a way to print out the application, fill it in, and mail it with a check.
Within a week of starting, you should have such a simple website up and running, and listed on the major website directory services. Such listings are free and allow cybernauts to enter words such as "hiking" or "trails" and "Orange County" or "Southern California" and find their way to your website as long as you make sure you are listed under the right keywords. You can also approach the webmasters of other synergistic websites with a request for a link to your website. These and other techniques amount to the new field of internet marketing and promotion. The best place to learn more about this is on the internet.
Once you are up and running, you can incrementally expand on the content and value of your web site. For each expansion, take a look at the development costs and the maintenance costs separately. You will often find volunteers to help develop content such as a trail map or a policy statement about a subdivision encroaching on your trails, but you may find it harder to find volunteers to maintain a calendar of activities. Maintenance just doesn't have the excitement and appeal of originating and launching new web pages. Unfortunately, website visitors who see stale content such as last month's calendar of activities are quick to drop your website from their bookmarks. We can give you lists of web-sites that have atrophied and fallen into disuse because they were built on good intentions rather than a solid maintenance plan.
The Good Time Net (http://www.goodtime.net) is a website that we have developed and it may be a viable answer to getting a grip on the maintenance of your online activities calendar. The Good Time Net is an online directory of recreational destinations and events in Orange County. It lists every park, trail, museum, historical land-mark, swimming pool, zoo, and recreation center that we know of in the county, whether operated by a city, the County, or a state, federal, nonprofit, or private organization. It also lists every recreational event we know of; including those sponsored by membership clubs and city recreational departments. We have over 4,000 web pages and you can search by geographical area, by keywords such as archery through yoga, by organization such as the Sierra Club, or by age group such as preschool through seniors. There is no fee to use the Good Time Net nor is there a fee to post your events.
You can fill out an online form to post an event as small as a Sunday afternoon horse ride, or fax us your monthly activities calendar. We enter it onto the Good Time Net and link to your web site from each event, where people can learn about joining your group. There's also a place where people can see a list of all your events. One of the reasons we can offer this for free is because we wrote a database software program that automates the maintenance of the Good Time Net. The database tracks each destination and each event, prints each web page, and produces all the crossindexes used to find locations and events.
We are also looking to expand on the information we have on the Good Time Net describing recreational destinations such as parks and trails. We have crude maps, for example, that we found in the public sector, and we would like to expand the detail and use fullness of those maps. Interested membership organizations can take printouts of our existing maps, mark them up with their observations and mail us photographs as well. We have made a significant investment in CAD software, digitizers, high-resolution color scanners, conversion software, reusable map icons, and the expertise to convert paper-based information to maintainable trail maps suitable for the internet. We also have the ability to activate such maps so users can click on icons on a map to see a description of the icon, or they can click on a trail on a park map to zoom in on the detailed map of the trail. Anyone helping develop trail maps gets a right to download the finished maps to their website if they choose, or they can link to it on the Good Time Net.
Having said all that, now I'll tell you how some of you can get your website on the internet for free, totally free. It's a program we have at my company to support recreation in Orange County. The requirements are simply that you be a non-profit, a government agency, or a membership organization contributing to recreation in Orange County and that you have an email address. I can refer you to where you can read more about this, but it ends up that you email your updates to us, we update your website, and website users contact you direct. At any time, you can move your website to another location if you get a better deal.
Along those lines, we also have an initiative under way to increase the number of working interpretive trails in Orange County. Consider that most trail management organizations are running out of funds to print the thousands of trail guides to tell hikers, bike riders and equestrians what is noteworthy at each numbered trail stop. Consider what happens if the trail guide, along with maps and photos is available online, and each trail marker notes the online address of the guide. Not only is there no cost to the trail managers, but the guide can be made temporal. That means trail users can be told about the robin's nest above stop #4 without thousands of printed maps becoming obsolete after the robin leaves. We also have translation software that can produce passable versions of the trail guide in Spanish and French. We will also have a users comments section where trail users can pass on trail advisories or suggestions. Our favorite feature is that we can force the cybernaut's email address to print on the trail guide, a step we feel may discourage the ecologically handicapped from littering. We have even allocated some funds to produce and install markers on a few interpretive trails.
Within a year, we hope to have versions of the Good Time Net in the counties around Orange County. If you want more information or to get involved, let me know.
Getting back to putting a presence on the internet for your recreational
organization, we would like to summarize that you can do it on a
shoestring, that your website can cut your communication costs, in fact it
can even earn a few bucks, that you can use it to increase attendance and
membership, and that you can use it as an effective way to promote your
mission, even if it is simply to have a good time. All you have to do is
leverage the access you have to your members, keep your web site simple,
and never underestimate the maintenance commitment you will need. If you
have a membership group making a contribution to the community, you can
count on my help to help you succeed on the internet.
Peter Shikli is the Program Manager of the Good Time Net at BusinessWare. He is also a degreed engineer with an MBA, a published and accredited instructor, and an active member of several outdoor organizations including:
You can reach him at (714) 369-1638, ext 77 or via email at pshikli@bizware.com.