To make it easier to better title activities where the route place has broadly varying options and alternatives, provide a list of alternate location names that may be used.

Specifically, when scheduling an activity allow the leader to choose an alternate title from an "Alternate Route/Place Title" list that is populated from a route/place "Route/Place Titles for Activity Titles" list.

Here's an example:

For a scramble of "Silver, Tinkham & Abiel Peaks," https://www.mountaineers.org/explore/routes-places/silver-tinkham-abiel-peaks, the activity title currently is and by default after implementing this idea would be:

Alpine Scramble - Silver, Tinkham & Abiel Peaks

Alternate activity titles with a choice of alternative route/place titles could be:

Alpine Scramble - Silver Peak

Alpine Scramble - Tinkham Peak 

Alpine Scramble - Abiel Peak

Alpine Scramble - Silver & Tinkham Peaks

Alpine Scramble - Silver & Abiel Peaks

Alpine Scramble - Tinkham & Abiel Peaks

One of the important functions of our Routes & Places is ensuring that we don't have multiple Mountaineers groups at the same place so this allows that conflict check to happen but also allows leaders to be more specific about where they are going and have the activity title accurately reflect that.

-------------------- Additional Info ----------------------------

An activity’s title is made from the activity template title and the route/place title. All of these titles are meant to be brief, simple and consistent across our website. If and when we implement the alternate route/place name feature, we have to keep the alternate titles brief, simple and consistent too. And the Route/Place title is only a geographic name. It purposefully conveys nothing about what one might do there. Any alternate route/place titles must too be just geographic names. We leave the what we're going to do to the to the Activity Template and activity's Summary.

The places for creativity about everything you plan to do go in the activity’s Summary and Leader’s Notes. Also remember that we show the first bit of the activity’s Summary in the activity search listings, so it is very much like a subtitle (lots more words allowed!).

See the attached image file of the an activity search result to see how this looks "in action."

To learn more about Routes & Places, visit the "Requesting New Routes & Places" page, https://www.mountaineers.org/volunteers/schedule-an-activity/requesting-new-routes-places.

We've been told that we have to use a generic route-place for an activity going to a particular locale even if that generic route-place is a poor fit to what we plan to do and may turn off potential participants. For example, a route-place may be listed as a scramble or climb and I want to list a hike or backpack there - it will show up in the activity search as a scramble and hikers won't want to do it. Or sometimes a route-place is listed as a hike and I want to do it as a backpack but the route-place description is very specific to a hiking itinerary. Can you allow us to enter separate routes-places to a similar locale for very different activity types, or allow multiple activity-type tags on the route-place? Likewise it might be listed as strenuous but my pace will make the activity moderate; could you possibly display the leader rating for the activity rather than the difficulty rating for the route-place on the search listing for activities?

At the scramble summit, there was unanimous desire to be able to tag a scramble as rock or snow. I gave two suggestions and they didn’t seem to have a strong opinion one way or another.

First: since Winter Scramble is under difficulty, just add Rock Scramble and Snow Scramble. They liked the simplicity of this and that if something is rock/snow you can just tag something as both. They did feel like its not truly a “difficulty” rating, so logically it doesn’t make a lot of sense under difficulty.

Second: Add a “scrambling category”. The benefit here is that it shows up where it makes more logical sense. The downside is we would need to list Rock Scramble, Snow Scramble, Rock/Snow Scramble and Other.

In order to track what the mountaineers does in terms of outdoor leadership, we would like two activity types:

Leader Development - Leadership Skills
Leader Development - Technical Skills

Below is the email thread for background:
Here’s a really quick stab at some language, for nothing else than to give us something to edit:

Leadership Skills
- May or may not be activity-specific.
- May or may not have a focus on outdoor leadership.

- Emphasis on facilitation, instruction, and/or group leadership.

Technical Skills
- Activity-specific.
- Skill development in activity that this person leads or aspires to lead. (Not quite sure how to word this, but trying to differentiate something like Canmore from the Basic Climbing Course.)
- May have an emphasis on incident management or activity-specific rescue techniques.

From: Becca Polglase
Sent: Thursday, January 11, 2018 2:56 PM
To: Tess Wendel <tessw@mountaineers.org>; Steve Smith <steves@mountaineers.org>; Sara Ramsay <sarar@mountaineers.org>
Subject: "outdoor leadership" activity type

Hi folks,

As we were talking about tracking participation in Outdoor Leadership activities, we decided we would like two categories:
Leader Development – Leadership Skills
Leader Development – Technical Skills

Two questions, probably both for Tess:
1. I was trying to utilize our current “Outdoor Leadership” type to edit and categorize courses and activities appropriately from 2017 so I could run a report for Elizabeth… For courses, it happens at the course template level and it works great. I created a report: https://na88.salesforce.com/00O1Y0000074Meh that’s saved in the Volunteers folder. We’ll likely have to do an annual data clean-up to make sure we aren’t missing any that aren’t tagged correctly, but I did that for 2017. For Activities, at the template level there is only a single-select. At the Activity level, you can multiselect, however there is help language discouraging this (and the help language is good I think). Is there a reason we can’t get a multi-select activity type at the template level? That would lead to much less year-end data clean-up.
2. What is the process by which we change the existing “outdoor leadership” course type to “leader development – leadership skills” and add a “leader development – technical skills”?

Steve/Sara – we should have some definitions.
Eg –
Canmore Ice Climbing is clearly LD – Technical Skills
Mick Pearson – LD – Technical Skills and LD – Leadership Skills
Leadership Conference – LD – Leadership Skills
Everett Instructors Clinic – LD – Leadership Skills and LD – Technical Skills
WRMC – LD – Leadership Skills? Or do we track this with some other method because it is not a mounties only thing?
ACA Trainings – LD – Leadership Skills and LD – Technical Skills? Or do we track this with some other method?

In some cases, we are charging people to participate and in others we are paying for them to participate. Do we care?

For now we can at least get the two categories going and the definitions written.

In family activities only, recognize when an adult attached to a youth membership has registered and override the Youth Information Form requirement for youth attached to the registered adult’s membership when they register. They would still need to be required to fill out the Family activities program form because otherwise we’d have no waiver on file for the youth.

Considerations:

What do we do if the parent or parents cancel? This is a family activity which should be parent-child combos, so this does not seem like but…?
From Becca - Is there an option to have the system cancel a child if the parent cancels and the child has no completed youth form?

What about friend-children who may come along (e.g. my dad, my best buddy and me)?
From Becca - Friend children need to complete the forms.
This should work as long as they are on their own family guest account. Is there a way to add text to the membership page https://www.mountaineers.org/members/muppet-gardner-pollmeier/manage-membership that indicates/warns members that they may only add youth to their family membership who they are the legal guardians for?

What if something happens to the parent (lost, major injury, etc.) on the trip such that they cannot provide info that would be on the form?
From Becca - We’ve decided this risk is very low, and at minimum we would have the child’s name, address and emergency contact info from the website.

When submitting a new Route/Place request I’d like an Activity Type for meetings, lectures, and other indoor activities. I just need one so you pick the terminology that serves best. I asked for this before and was rejected because the PC’s understanding for our outing takes precedence over ours. Now I’ve run into the issue again and I reiterate that we have indoor activities, like lectures for our courses and we need a suitable activity type to classify them.

Thankfully, activity type is optional now, so we no longer need to describe a meeting room as an “urban adventure”. But the real need is to get a check box filter on “meeting” or “indoor gathering” or something like that in the Routes/Places search so that we can bring all of them up at once and see what’s available.

I’ve already had two volunteers give up on trying to add needed Route/Places because there wasn’t a suitable activity type. What’s the harm in adding one more for this type of activity and lessening the confusion amongst our volunteers?