Squadron Website In A Box

[futura]

Has any wing, group or squadron developed a plug and play website? If it's already set up for CAP, all the better.

My squadron's website has gone down and apparently the code is so ancient that it's not worth rebuilding. Looking for a speedy solution so that we can get back on line during the upcoming recruiting cycle.

Thank you!

Futura

[dwb]

http://www.capmembers.com/cap_national_hq/public_affairs/branding_resource_guide/

Plain HTML and Wordpress templates available on that page (last link in the list)

[Spam]

We just took the suggested templates provided to us and tinkered to fit.

Seems to be working ok so far... some things we modified (repeating the unit name three times is kind of klunky, etc.). Still gotta get that front page splash fixed/updated, and no offense to our pals up north, but I'd like a local, non-Mt. Rushmore pic on the front.

http://www.ga045.org/


V/R
Spam

[NIN]

Pylon loaned me his squadron's template, among other things.

Took me about 2 hrs of tinkering in Wordpress to eliminate all his NY Wing content and put ours in.  Not hard, really.

http://concordcap.org

[TheSkyHornet]

Pylon loaned me his squadron's template, among other things.

Took me about 2 hrs of tinkering in Wordpress to eliminate all his NY Wing content and put ours in.  Not hard, really.

http://concordcap.org

That's a really cool site.

I'm personally not a huge fan of ours, and our PAO doesn't seem to be either. He did tell me that it was an immediate fix to the original site, which was based off of the OHWG website (that's my understanding at least), which is just plain awful and severely outdated with information and design.

I proposed a new, custom website. Didn't get a whole lot of support on that one. Websites are a major part of recruiting and retention. But it's not really my area since I'm not the Public Affairs person or Recruiting Officer. I do have other priorities.

[JAFO78]

Both sites are great. Our squadron doesn't have one at all, and my old squadron's is out of date. Does a web site help any??

[NIN]

Both sites are great. Our squadron doesn't have one at all, and my old squadron's is out of date. Does a web site help any??

To a point, yes.

During our last recruiting, we had a pilot come to us.  He lives in a town down near our major metro area.

From where he lives, he can drive 5 minutes into the big city (there is a squadron there). He can turn one way, head down the highway to a city (with a squadron and airplanes) about 20 minutes, or he can turn left and head up the highway toward a slightly smaller city (with a squadron and airplane) about 25 minutes away.

He'd done his research on CAP.  Squadron A (big city sq), Sq B (next smaller city, airplanes) or Sq C.  Based on his research on the units, strictly from the Internet, he concluded that Sq A wasn't very active, since their website hadn't been updated since June; Sq B's website was hot when FrontPage 2.0 and embedded music was a thing; and Sq C had a kick butt website that looked like they were actually doing things in the last 2 weeks.

Then the Facebook ad for our unit open house popped up (Best $40 I've spent in a long time).  Squadron C it was.  I got an email 10 minutes later.

Did the website help? Yes.  Did it seal the deal? Maybe.  But the targeted Facebook ad pushed it over the top.

[NC Hokie]

Then the Facebook ad for our unit open house popped up (Best $40 I've spent in a long time).  Squadron C it was.  I got an email 10 minutes later.

Did the website help? Yes.  Did it seal the deal? Maybe.  But the targeted Facebook ad pushed it over the top.

Tell us more about the Facebook ad.

[Spam]

Pylon loaned me his squadron's template, among other things.

Took me about 2 hrs of tinkering in Wordpress to eliminate all his NY Wing content and put ours in.  Not hard, really.

http://concordcap.org

I really like yours so much better than ours; you have things there that I asked for, and which I'm told the NHQ template wont support. My guys tinkered with it quite a bit, and turned in comments, etc. as requested but its been almost 90 days with no feedback. If we don't get a response, then we're poised to dump the "standard" template and go our own way, as we'd started to do before being told that NHQ wanted us to go use this template.

V/R
Spam

[TheSkyHornet]

Both sites are great. Our squadron doesn't have one at all, and my old squadron's is out of date. Does a web site help any??

How's your membership, and what do you do to get the word out about your squadron?

A website is an important way of getting people, in their spare time, research your unit and invest themselves to learn about the squadron. It's a major recruiting tool. Websites are also very important in communicating information to your existing members, but that's subjective to how you use it for that purpose.

[NIN]

Then the Facebook ad for our unit open house popped up (Best $40 I've spent in a long time).  Squadron C it was.  I got an email 10 minutes later.

Did the website help? Yes.  Did it seal the deal? Maybe.  But the targeted Facebook ad pushed it over the top.

Tell us more about the Facebook ad.

So yeah, first things first:



Fall 2015 BCT Flight Graduation (There are 3 cadet NCOs and 1 SM in that photo.. I'll save you the counting: 21)

For our fall open house we had > 50 non-squadron people there.

First, we plan ahead. I know now when our spring open house is.  I've got the flyers built, and we put the event on our webpage and our FB page starting next week.

So two ways you can go:
1) Create an "event" on the unit FB page; or
2) Create a post about the Open House.

I do *both* (we put the event out there way in advance, and then the post)

Then you hit that neato "Boost Post" button on the post or event, and create an ad campaign.

The FB system lets you "target" your advertising.  I am honestly not that savvy when it comes to this, I just kind of poked around and let it rip, and while it was sucessful, our Dear Mr. Pylon will tell you that there are *way* better ways of doing it with better refinement and messaging. This is just a start for folks as ham-handed as me. I'm sort of like approaching heart surgery with a chainsaw.

First is "Location."  You can pick a town or similar, and then give it a "range." We're set for 25 miles around our town.  Honestly, we should probably target *closer* (ie. 15 miles) but we do actually cover in some directions 25-30 miles from the unit, so with that setting we might overlap the unit to our south and the unit to our north a little.   There are a whole bunch of criteria you can use (city, country, state, etc) and you can also exclude places (so if I was being neighborly, I'd exclude specifically the city to my south that falls inside the 25 mile veil.. Now that I know that, I may do that this time around).

Next is Age. I picked "13-18" for our previous campaigns. This last time, I expanded it from 18 to 50. I wanted seniors.  (Note: I picked 50 as an arbitrary number. I could have gone higher, and maybe I should go *lower*).  Of course, for Gender we picked "All"

Next, you can narrow your focus even a little more by targeting the ads to people who have expressed certain interests in their FB profiles.   Some might say "Why not just include everybody?" but I think when it comes to this kind of advertising, you want to first focus on the people who are going to be your most likely candidates that already have an expressed interest in your fields of endeavor.    So we picked "Interests > Additional Interests" of "Emergency Management," "Leadership," "Rescue," "Rocketry," and "Search and rescue."   We also picked the "Interests > Business and industry" of "Aviation" and "Interests > Hobbies and activities > politics and social issues" of "Military." There are a whole range of options here, and these are the ones that to us made sense at the time. The targeting options change a lot, so you should always revisit these with each campaign.

You then set a budget and a time frame, and FB will tell you your audience definition (narrow or broad.. ours is in the middle), approximate reach (in our case  possibly 34,000 people), and the Estimated Daily Reach (in this case, 1300-3500 people).

You can fiddle with your budget, targeting and time frame to give you the "most bang for your buck."  In our case, it was about 10 days starting 12-14 days before the event (in the case of the post) and about 3 weeks before the event (in the case of the event/calendar entry). 

You Facebook page manager has to put a CC on file with FB to pay for it.  Our criteria above was for that one campaign was $30, and you *might* exhaust that before your campaign ends depending on how many people click thru, etc.  I just realized we spent more than $40, because the event (calendar event) campaign ran a little longer and that was $59 itself.  SO we spent about $90 on FB ads for that open house.  Couple that with the $40 we spent in printing fliers, and the $25 spent in creating membership packets, and you can see that we spent about $7.25 per cadet recruited (and we go 4 SMs in that last campaign, too, so ok, it was more like $6.25 per member recruited.)

Your head about pops off your shoulders with pride when people start streaming in the door and you have to tell the cadets "Quick, set up more chairs!!"

Now, is this the ONLY way to do it? No.

Play with it. Try it. Spend $30 on ads. See what effect it has. 

But don't do it just to "boost your page." Do it with a specific recruiting event in mind.  That way you can more easily enumerate your success.   Try it, see if it works, rinse, repeat.

[Paul Creed III]

Then the Facebook ad for our unit open house popped up (Best $40 I've spent in a long time).  Squadron C it was.  I got an email 10 minutes later.

Did the website help? Yes.  Did it seal the deal? Maybe.  But the targeted Facebook ad pushed it over the top.

+1 for the Facebook boosted post. We ran a campaign during the holiday break to advertise our new cadet and senior classes starting this month. With a professionally-designed graphic (I'm lucky enough to have a great graphics guy in my squadron) and a $300 budget, we had nearly 37,000 people see the post and over 1,700 post actions (likes, shares, or comments) and the page like count went up by over 60. I've got around a dozen potential new cadets (and a bunch of parents who could always become seniors) and a dozen potential new seniors coming in the doors this month.

[TheSkyHornet]

Then the Facebook ad for our unit open house popped up (Best $40 I've spent in a long time).  Squadron C it was.  I got an email 10 minutes later.

Did the website help? Yes.  Did it seal the deal? Maybe.  But the targeted Facebook ad pushed it over the top.

+1 for the Facebook boosted post. We ran a campaign during the holiday break to advertise our new cadet and senior classes starting this month. With a professionally-designed graphic (I'm lucky enough to have a great graphics guy in my squadron) and a $300 budget, we had nearly 37,000 people see the post and over 1,700 post actions (likes, shares, or comments) and the page like count went up by over 60. I've got around a dozen potential new cadets (and a bunch of parents who could always come seniors) and a dozen potential new seniors coming in the doors this month.

I'll vouch for Maj Creed's efforts. That's a squadron that knows recruiting (and I'm stealing ideas  ).

[NIN]

Gaaah. $300 budget? I did that stuff on a lark (out of my own pocket) just to see what would happen

[TheSkyHornet]

I'd also like to add that Lt Col Ninness and I have chattered about this previously and our squadron is following in his footsteps, to some degree, to make significant changes to our recruiting and new cadet training plan.

While I was unable to get the entirety of his ideas in the final plan this time around due to some nervousness and dissent by some of our senior members, the overall regard for this style of recruiting and training have been received very positively by seniors as well as cadets at our squadron. Our first class is coming up on 14 Feb. The training side, I think, will be okay for the most part. I think the recruiting is a bit under par, and I attribute some of that due to website issues and lack of social media face (not just sharing CAP posts, but really marketing the unit).

Bottom line:
These are two men I would definitely listen to. They have results to show.

[JAFO78]

Both sites are great. Our squadron doesn't have one at all, and my old squadron's is out of date. Does a web site help any??

How's your membership, and what do you do to get the word out about your squadron?

A website is an important way of getting people, in their spare time, research your unit and invest themselves to learn about the squadron. It's a major recruiting tool. Websites are also very important in communicating information to your existing members, but that's subjective to how you use it for that purpose.

My old squadron is up to 70 members combined. Growing good, with some dead weight. My new squadron has on the average of 12 cadets per meeting. almost all Sr's are pilot types. They have no web site which is sad since a Sr member is a IT guy. They do have a FB page that is updated about once a month.

[futura]

This has been a very constructive discussion. I really appreciate seeing the tools and reading the proof points.

[TheSkyHornet]

Both sites are great. Our squadron doesn't have one at all, and my old squadron's is out of date. Does a web site help any??

How's your membership, and what do you do to get the word out about your squadron?

A website is an important way of getting people, in their spare time, research your unit and invest themselves to learn about the squadron. It's a major recruiting tool. Websites are also very important in communicating information to your existing members, but that's subjective to how you use it for that purpose.

My old squadron is up to 70 members combined. Growing good, with some dead weight. My new squadron has on the average of 12 cadets per meeting. almost all Sr's are pilot types. They have no web site which is sad since a Sr member is a IT guy. They do have a FB page that is updated about once a month.

In our case, we seem to have a lot of technologically-friendly members who want to see modernization (more electronic, less paper). Our website is becoming bigger and more important with how we communicate, and we're starting to discuss ways to get away from some of the older resources that have been used which we can run now off of our site. We're very heavy on giving out the link to our site, so it helps for us to have a strong website to back that up. When we say "visit us at www...." you want the recruit to be captured by where we sent them. That's huge when we have external recruiting, like at an air show.

I see several squadrons with fairly large rosters, and much more senior involvement than cadet involvement. No, I should correct that statement. I see a lot more senior attendance, sometimes they sit around and BS the entire meeting and don't actually contribute. Many of them don't actually hold duty positions other than being assistant-to-the-assistant's assistant, and if you asked them, they stare at each other to figure out who's responsible for what.

I'm personally very big on using the website to share yourself. It's a showcase. But, it works for some units not to do that. There's no perfect method to recruiting and retention, nor communicating information.