--  15 Days Until Relay --

 

It's the tree falling in the forest thing. We spend time and energy building the site, but will anyone show up? A cool site that no one sees would be frustrating.

 

Think about web sites you regularly visit... what got you there in the first place? Why do you keep going back? I don't know about you, but unless I'm using a reference, the reason I return to a site is to see something new. If I go there and find the same thing as before, it's unlikely that I'll go back... at least not anytime soon. On the other hand, if I return to a site and discover new and interesting things, and that happens the next time as well, then I'll probably return.

 

The same is true for our Relay sites. People need a reason (and opportunity) to show up in the first place, and before they leave, they need an expectation that compels them to return. Our task boils down to getting people to visit once, and then get them to come back. And when they do return, we'd better not disappoint them. Wow, no pressure...  :)

 

It also occurs to me that we all begin with a different challenge, depending on our "customer base" and our Relay's history of using online. For example, the folks that participate in our county represent a wide range of age groups and levels of tech-comfort. The same might not be true for other Relays. Additionally, this year Green County will mark it's 15th Relay For Life, but as far as I know, online has not been previously emphasized. Getting folks to associate online with Relay is another facet of our challenge.

 

 

When it comes to getting that first visit, we have concentrated effort on putting our URL in front of people at every opportunity. I found that many people did not know how to get to our site. I would ask (even of those on the team), "Hey, have you been to the site?" and they'd reply "Oh... not yet. But I will! Umm... now where is it?". 

 

So, we put the URL everywhere we could. This is an opportunity to work closely with your Publicity/Promotions Chair, and with the team captains. The team captains probably got tired of me telling them to "include the URL!" on whatever they were creating. Below are some ideas.

 

Plaster the URL:

• On all fundraiser flyers, all posters, t-shirts, Relay "business cards", etc.
• On every handout given to team captains, team members, or the public
• On the billboards for the event
• On every email sent concerning the Relay, generated out of Convio or otherwise. When appropriate, include it in your business & personal email signature as well.
• In every news release and article for the local news (paper, radio, web sites)
• On all posts to all RFL forums and blogs

   

It's true that one could search for our Relay by using the "Find Local Events" on the main Relay site (assuming the user know how to get there). As the "Tips and Hints" section notes on www.relayforlife.org, it's important that you try searching for your Relay there, and to let your local office know if you don't find it.

 

However, I think it's a valid assumption the most of the public will use one of the major search engines to find their local Relay, and that most will try the biggest of all search engines. At first, searching Google for "Relay For Life Of Greene County" did not return the results that we desired, to say the least. Their spider crawled our site soon after I started modifying it, but the resulting indexing/ranking seemed to emphasize everything except what I wanted: you could find our site by searching "Fight Like A Girl T-Shirt", but not by searching "Relay For Life of Greene County". In fact, comments I made on a forum here were indexed and produced better hits for our URL than using the name of our Relay.

 

I realize that getting good indexing/ranking on Google and the other engines is high voodoo science, so rather than dig in deep I took advice I found on the High Plains Division Online Resource Site, and listed our site on the Open Directory Project. This organization human-edits submissions, and then makes the resulting list available for free. Major search engines use that in their core directory services. I submitted our URL to the site; three weeks later we were indexed on the Open Directory, and things suddenly looked a whole lot better on Google, Yahoo, Lycos, Ask, and other search engines.

 

I also set up a page on Facebook. I wasn't too keen on having another site to maintain, so it's minimal. It's mostly there to direct people to our RFL site.

 

We were doing what we could to let the public know the location of our site, but I was still concerned that once registered, team members weren't visiting. To address this situation I tried two techniques: "The Chant," and "Ralf The Relay Bug."

 

The Chant is simply our URL. I stood up in front of the Relay Rally Crowd and said "Repeat after me! WWW (crowd: WWW!) Relay For Life Dot Org! (crowd: Relay For Life Dot Org!) Slash Greene T N! (crowd: Slash Greene T N!)." We repeated that three or four times. They were surprisingly good at it.

 

Ralf The Relay Bug is a 2" x 2" square of stiff paper with a bug printed on one side. The other side has a small piece of double-sided tape, so that you can stick Ralf right onto the edge of your computer monitor. What makes Ralf special is a tattoo across his back which spells out the URL of our site. I passed around a Bug Basket of these at the next Rally, asking the team captains to take one for each member of their team. Silly? Yes. Effective? Maybe...

 

Those are some ideas about getting people to the site. I know that there are lots of other ideas out there... I'd love to hear about them. Next time, the subject is getting folks to come again.