Advice for a new CC

[Liz]

On 9/30/2019 at 5:23 AM, Cburkhardt said:

You can visit our site at http://www.ScoutsBsaDcGirls.org  if you want to see our take on this. 

 

I love your website! Is this a template that's available for purchase or did someone donate their time and talents to create it just for your Troop? We are looking at getting our website up and running shortly and man, if we don't have to re-invent the wheel, it would make me happy!

[Treflienne]

The www.ScoutsBsaDcGirls.org website is great!

Our troop ended up going with using the services provided by bsahosting.org    Our committee member who was looking into this liked that the website came with email lists for the troop with a reasonable privacy policy that did not involve selling our data.    They have a template troop website that a troop can customize.

[Cburkhardt]

The results of the Troop coffee fundraiser are in, and we netted $7,600 to surpass our goal of $4,000.  We probably have another $500 to come in from some stragglers.  On top of this we received $6,000 from some institutional sources, so we have what we need to greatly subsidize the costs of our under-resourced families and their girls in our 30-Scout Troop.  We will use some for some equipment purchases and make a Friends of Scouting contribution to our local council (something like $1,500).  The rest we will save to begin building our long-term fund for stability.  Thanks to everyone for the many good suggestions.  We used every one of them.

Note to Liz:  There is no girl-specific Web Site template out there at this point.  We wrote ours from scratch after we figured out how we would operate.  Then we did our best to determine what an 11-13 year old girl and her parents would want to know about that implementation and wrote to that specific interest in our very-urban environment.  We talk directly to that girl except for my “Scoutmaster’s Letter” to the parents — but even that is very specific to our urban all-girl implementation.  I will say the writing of the site turned out to be the way we ended up understanding our challenges and deciding how the Troop would launch and operate.  The site has been a huge hit.  Our new parents love it because it is beginner-friendly and explains the basics without using any Scouting lingo or abbreviations.  While not relevant to our use of our site, it is interesting to note that it has been viewed by 2.2K discrete visitors since going active on October 1, 2018, including viewers from 40 countries.  Maybe this is just a typical result for troop web sites — I just don’t know.

[qwazse]

10 hours ago, Cburkhardt said:

.. 2.2K discrete visitors since going active on October 1, 2018, including viewers from 40 countries.  Maybe this is just a typical result for troop web sites — I just don’t know. 

That's actually fairly typical traffic for any new website. Folks out their are really bored.

Actually, with the slew of World Scouts Jamboree participants passing through DC, you'd pop up on a lot of their searches.

But, here's hoping that some of those are scouts whose parents are relocating to your fine city for a time and they want to stay active. The Italian exchange student who joined my crew was thrilled when she heard that she could continue scouting with my crew. It wasn't a perfect fit for her, but I think it bridged a couple of gaps.