Evidence of failure of CAP public affairs

[RiverAux]

A neat new tool that is available for tracking the number of times that particular terms are searched for on the internet is Google Trends.  I recently ran the numbers for the term "Civil Air Patrol" and it is not good news.  Basically since 2004 the use of that term has dropped by half. 

The graph below shows the relative frequency of search on this term. 



If you run the numbers a different way and start with January 2004 as your "average" and compare the number of searches to that date, we are down by half.  The website doesn't graph it that way for you, but you can download the data and graph it yourself to see this yourself. 

So, if you consider the number of times people go looking for CAP on the web as a good indicator of the general level of interest in the organization, we're on a downward slide.  Note that there was a huge increase in 2007 during the Fossett search while there was only a minor blip for Deepwater Horizon.  Shows the difference between being at the center of a national event vs being at the extreme edges. 

Interestingly, we're not alone -- the Air Force is in a bit of trouble as well:

[a2capt]

So, what happened earlier, NASCAR?  ...and that peak in latter 2007, Generalissimo? Obviously something got folks attention back when.

[JC004]

Yup, that's indeed what happened with that spike.  This is very sad.   

[Eclipse]

Basically since 2004 the use of that term has dropped by half. 

Yet are membership and missions are up.

So people don't search for CAP, I don't see the issue.

Also, despite my best effort, a lot of people are connecting with various organizations through "social" media site, not search engines.
Bad news for Google, means nothing to us.

[Майор Хаткевич]

What's supposed to be on the Y-Axis?

[jimmydeanno]

What about people searching for:

"C.A.P."
"CAP"
"Air Force Auxiliary"
"CAP Cadet"
"Cadet"
"Red White and Blue Airplane I saw at the airshow"
"Tri-prop in white triangle"

Maybe they're using Google Goggles on our logo and running the search that way...

Maybe the searches have dropped because our website is on all the literature people get.  I don't search for "Civil Air Patrol" when I have something that says information is found at www.GoCivilAirPatrol.com

Perhaps it is an indicator of our marketing success that people aren't searching for us because they're going directly, or linking through the Facebook page.  Maybe they're getting all their CAP information from twitter.  No point in searching if the information comes right to you...

[Майор Хаткевич]

It's an index...who knows how they did it...

[Eclipse]

Interestingly, the most searches of the term "Civil Air Patrol" come from Alaska, by almost a 2-1 margin over the next highest state.

[RADIOMAN015]

How about the number of hits on "CAP Volunteer Now" website?  Has it gone up, down, stayed the same

Also in google news you can set up an email alert for any terms you want e.g. "Civil Air Patrol" and you will get an email every day with a summary and hot key to every article.  Does this count as a search in the google or is it internal to google and not counted

RM 

[lordmonar]

The number of searches is down....and that's a failure of PA because?

Maybe the number of searches are down because it is now easier to get to CAP related stuff.  Or possible the number of alternate search engines.  Or the number of people who are searching for CAP is down.

None of this is an indicator that PA did anything wrong of failing.

A PA failure looks like.....putting out erronious information.  Knowingly lie to the media...and getting caught.  Releasing information that by law/policy/good sense should be kept quiet.

[RiverAux]

You can go to Google Trends for more information on how the information is put together.  Basically it is a relative index. 

The other terms don't get searched enough or aren't CAP-specific enough to tell us anything. 

I don't have access to information on usage statistics for CAP web pages.  I don't recall that information ever being released.  If it shows a different trend that would be great.

There is absolutely no way to spin a decline in searches for Civil Air Patrol on the web as anything other than a failure of our public affairs program (on all levels) to generate interest in the organization among the general public. 

Sure, there are some other places that people might start a search for information on an organization that caught their interest.  But it would be pretty stupid to do your basic research starting with social media rather than the web. 

The idea that people are going direct to our website because of the literature we pass out is laughable.  If we're depending on that to drive traffic to our web site, we're in major trouble.  Again, NHQ probably has the capability to analyze direct traffic vs web search driven traffic and if that information is made public and shows a different trend, that would be great. 

FYI, I ran the program on Army, Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard and only the Navy and Marines show stable trends over this period.  The Army and Coast Guard have also declined. 

[Eclipse]

I wonder how Google Instant factors into that, it's a fairly new service, but a lot of people may never get to the whole term since what they need
pops up by the third or fourth letter.

[lordmonar]

okay.....so......you just trolling for how CAP isn't doing it right....once again.

Google trend shows a drop in searches.....okay....next issue.

[RiverAux]

Oh, and to show how Google Trends can represent a huge surge in public interest despite social media, etc. that might result in bypassing traditional web search, lets look at our good friend Snooki from the Jersey Shore show on MTV. 

[RiverAux]

okay.....so......you just trolling for how CAP isn't doing it right....once again.

Google trend shows a drop in searches.....okay....next issue.

Yes, I have been a consistent critic of CAP's public affairs program in general as are several on this board.  And how many times have we heard on this board "thats just a solution in search of a problem"?  Well, here is evidence of a problem.  And its not the only evidence -- heck, look at CAP's public awareness plan that shows that only about 10% of US adults know that CAP has done anything good for their community and its even worse in that 80% of those who are familiar with CAP don't know that we've done anything to benefit the community. 

There are plenty of threads where solutions to this issue have been offered by me and others, but forgive me for providing a new line of evidence showing that a problem exists.

[Thom]

Just as an experiment, I put in 'boy scouts' and got almost the same trend line over the same time frame. So, whatever we are doing wrong, they are also...

Or, it's an artifact of Google's trending analysis...virtually every organization I looked at has a similar trend line from 2004 to 2011. Even 'ROTC', although it has wild cyclical swings each year...surprise.

Even 'home schooling' has the same trend line over the same time period, and I'm pretty sure that hasn't fallen off the public radar. (Although, interestingly, over the same time frame 'charter schools' jumped bigtime...)

Also, 'toastmasters' and 'girl scouts' lost the same ground as CAP, though the 'knights of columbus' and the 'shriners' held pretty steady.

I think we need a more rigorous statistical analysis before deciding that this info means much of anything.

Of course, that is not to say that CAP's PA and Branding hasn't been inept and unfocused over that time, just that this might not be the data to prove it...


Thom

[MSG Mac]

Not that I take any interest in the statistics, but the downward trend could be as simple as people using  non-google search engines

[RiverAux]

Another way of looking at things is looking at the number of articles in which Civil Air Patrol is mentioned.  You can actually do this with Google News Archives search.  While their data goes back a ways, I think that there are problems using news stories as a metric back in the old days since there are probably way more papers online and visible to google now than then. 

But, if we look at just the period since 2000 we also see a decline in CAP news stories, mostly since we started our national PA plans -- and that is even with an increasing trend in online publishing which you would think that even if CAP did nothing different over this entire period would show an increasing trend in CAP stories since more of those that would have been published anyway are now online.

2000= 949
2001= 1,210
2002= 1,400
2003= 1,850
2004= 1,830
2005= 2,190
2006= 2,200
2007= 3,080
2008= 2,330
2009= 1,870
2010= 1,220

[ol'fido]

Interestingly, the most searches of the term "Civil Air Patrol" come from Alaska, by almost a 2-1 margin over the next highest state.

Much higher percentage of aircraft and aircraft owners per capita. 1 aircraft for every 60 people was the number used on the History Channel's "Tougher In Alaska" show the other night.

[RiverAux]

I think we need a more rigorous statistical analysis before deciding that this info means much of anything.

Oh, I certainly wouldn't say that this represents either high quality data or statistical analysis, but it is at least as good as any other data available to us at this point.  Web site hit data would be nice to have as well.

Maybe I should talk about who I think is failing in this case. 

I certainly don't put all or actually even much blame on NHQ.  While I think we probably could expect more from our paid staff they are no more at the heart of our public affairs program than are the NHQ paid ES guys are at the heart of our ES program.  They have let us down in certain areas without a doubt.  Maybe the blame is more on those who set our budget priorities and maybe they haven't been given the resources to really do any sort of national marketing campaign.

The main problem is that there is an extreme shortage of active unit public affairs officers and mission information officers to get CAP the publicity it needs at the local and state level.  An active PAO can just do wonders, but most are either ghosts on the organization chart or just barely active. 

Now, someone made the point earlier that our membership is growing so how bad could our public affairs be?  Well, if we were growing at a really strong clip, that might hold water.  But, on average we're barely adding 1 or 2 new members per unit across the country.  That hardly represents any sort of surge and I think that any unit should be able to sustain that rate with no public affairs program at all.  We have all been part of or heard of major public affairs events [put on by some unit resulting in huge spikes in membership.  If that was happening across the country our membership might be increasing by 10-20K per year and we'd be adding units across the country.  Any increase is great and shows that some units somewhere are doing things right, but its nothing to brag about. 

Now, lets turn to the "other organizations are doing bad so its no big deal if CAP is doing bad" argument.  I'm not surprised the Boy and Girl Scout trends are down.  Their membership has been falling.  The Boy Scouts lost 3% of their UNITs from 2009 to 2010.  Membership organizations such as ours have been in a general downturn for decades.  Toastmasters are a different story -- they have actually been growing at a great clip over recent years according to their annual report (an increase of 22% from 2006-2010) and if you measure them by number of news references (like I did with CAP in my last post) their number of mentions has been on the rise while ours has been on a decline.  If anything that might show a positive relationship between news stories and very high membership growth rates.