Skip to content

Share Your Idea

← General Feedback

Branches and Committees self-maintain content on their pages

Allow Branches and Committees to self-maintain their pages. Committees can now maintain a brief description, but it is limited to text and cannot contain any formatting, images, links, or other useful stuff. There is currently a fairly long description for each Branch, but it is too static and, as far as I can tell, maintained by the PC. With more control of Branch page(s) on the club website, the need for Branches to have the separate websites is minimized.

25 votes

We're glad you're here

Please sign in to leave feedback
Signed in as (Sign out)
Close
Close

We’ll send you updates on this idea

Dennis Miller shared this idea  ·   ·  Report…  ·  Admin →
Completed  ·  Garrett Arnold responded  · 

Committee pages have a new look! Go check them out and start adding content to the rich text description and summary. You can also create a folder and then create a whole new webpage with extra content that you can link to . Check out Tacoma Sea Kayaking, Olympia Hiking, Everett Scrambling, Seattle climbing as examples where some content has been added. Committee admins should be able to edit and committee members can now delete and archive content. Check out the Tech 2.3 Blog on the homepage for more web updates. Contact member services for additional questions about updating your committee pages. Additionally there are new links on the Getting Started pages which link back to branch communities and from the Learn menu to divert people to get plugged into their branches.

Show previous admin responses (5)
Comments are closed An error occurred while saving the comment
  • Stephen Fox commented  ·   ·  Report

    Jeff, what is the vision for what will change?

  • Deb Fox commented  ·   ·  Report

    IMO, the Everett Branch's small community is a big selling-point to get more volunteers and students. We are smaller, and can give more intimate instruction, and form closer inter-personal bonds with fellow members. It does not hurt the Mountaineers' brand as a whole to have our own website that posts more information relevant to our branch. But it will hurt our community to be homogenized and rolled into a gigantic web presence that limits the information we want to share with our members.

  • Dennis Miller commented  ·   ·  Report

    It's a sad day when protecting the brand takes precedence over serving our volunteers. The irony is two-fold. First, the centralized authority imposed to protect the brand is contrary to the very brand it claims to protect. It feels more like protecting the power structure, to me. Second, committees and branches working within the framework of the club website actually produce better brand protection than when they strike out on their own.

    What were talking about has the potential to make volunteers more productive, increase the number of volunteers able to contribute, make the club's collective web presence more consistent, drive more traffic to the main website, and reduce the confusion that results from switching between websites.

    I'll probably be censured for suggesting this, but the club that once was, and still claims to be, volunteer-driven is steering a course away from that model to one where volunteers serve the staff, rather than the other way around.

  • [Deleted User] commented  ·   ·  Report

    I can certainly appreciate that our staff wants to 'protect the brand'. I think all of us in branch leadership roles share this intent. Still, it seems strange that our branches would be trusted to run huge and complex courses and hundreds of activities, the main things that attract most members to the club, but we can't be trusted to write the text of our own branch pages in a way that 'protects the brand'. Surely a handful of people on the staff aren't the only ones who can follow a set of agreed-upon standards to effectively present our 'brand'. We need to sit down together and discuss this openly and constructively. Branch pages aren't the only place that this way of thinking pops up, and I believe we can be more collaborative than that across the club.

    That said, if there is no way we can bridge this divide, I wholeheartedly endorse Jeff's suggestion below as the best alternative.

  • Jeff Schrepple commented  ·   ·  Report

    This idea has been offered before and rejected because the PC wants to control the website image in order to protect the Mountaineers "brand."
    However, we have seen that this is possible where the branches are able to enter Events and then "submit for Publication." After the PC reviews the submission it is either published for all to see or changes are requested prior to publication.

    In this same manner, the branches could submit their page changes and "submit for pulication." The PC could then review and publish or ask for changes. In either event they control the content and the Mountaineers brand while allowing the branches to develop the content and control the content of their branch site.

  • Dennis Miller commented  ·   ·  Report

    The rosters need to include contact info: email and phone number. Ideally, there would be a button to send email from the roster page, just like other rosters

General Feedback: Volunteers

Categories

Feedback and Knowledge Base

(thinking…)