Your Club’s Goals on the Web

During the process of putting together FAAS’ new site, I visited every member club site I could find.

Some clubs do a good job on the web. Others could use some help.

Before your club gets started on the web or makes a change, your club needs to decide on a set of goals. What do you want the web to do for you?

Better, reverse the question

• What does your club need to do and how can the web help?

What’s important to your club?

Prioritize the following list at your next board meeting:
__    Attract new members
__    Keep current members informed
__    Increase participation from current members
__    Generate revenue
__    Generate publicity
__    Generate interest in the aquarium hobby (or hobby segment)
__    Create an on-line community within your club
__    Elevate the stature of your club (how your club is perceived by others)

The web site you build must reflect the prioritized goals of your board. These goals affect more than you think! They touch everything from the layout of individual pages to site structure to the ultimate cost in dollars to your club.

Get this part right and rest is a lot easier.

Here’s a hint— look at your club’s mission statement or purpose. You should find this in your organization’s constitution.

What are your top three goals from the list above? You can’t do everything on the list, at least not in your site’s first iteration.

A Case Study

In late 1998, I prodded the board of the Greater Chicago Cichlid Association to get on the web. The GCCA board was receptive and a committee was formed shortly after. Eight members met and went through the goals above.

Like virtually all clubs, we suffered from too few people doing too much work. We wanted to reach more people. We wanted to attract new members. We wanted to be seen as a “cool” club that offered a lot. We wanted a central place where everybody could find information about our club.

Here’s some truth that’s difficult to swallow.

Individual club members cost more than their memberships. If you are going to attract new members, it will cost your club more money not only to “sign” them, but to maintain them as members. Benefits such as publications, good speakers, quality meeting space, holiday parties, outings, books for the club library, etc. are expensive.

Like most clubs, GCCA holds regularly scheduled swap meets and auctions. These activities make up the bulk of the club’s revenue.

It was our idea to use our web site to gather names of cichlid-fanciers who would attend our events. By increasing attendance, we’d create more revenue and be able to deliver additional benefits to members.

Thus, the number one goal of the site was to acquire names (email addresses) of potential “customers”. What would we have to do to earn the trust of our site visitors so that they’d give us their email address? Would they keep coming back?

Our second goal was to make the site a place where current members could get access to forms and other information necessary for the day-to-day business of the club. We spent a lot of time discussing what and where information should be organized.

The committee members were all avid cichlid hobbyists who felt strongly about promoting the hobby. Indeed, promoting the cichlid hobby was a core mission of the GCCA. Our third goal, then, was to fulfill this mission through the web. Interestingly, there were committee members that needed to be convinced that this was a good idea. Essentially, the argument was: “Why create all this content (that’s what we web folks call the information we put on web sites) for some guy in Australia to read about? We’re only interested in cichlid hobbyists in Chicago.”

The challenge and beauty of the web is that once you’re on it, you’re global. It’s impossible to “narrow-cast”. You have to share with everybody, or not share at all. Your job is to create something a global audience will appreciate, but a target audience will act upon.