Our First Cyber-Recruit

Last night Troop 24 welcomed its first Scout recruited by our web
page. His family had moved to Berkeley recently and wanted to
reconnect with the various activities they had been doing before.
So they went to the World Wide Web, typed the words "Boy Scout Troop
Berkeley" into the search engine, and found us!

He came to our meeting a week ago, liked what he saw, and turned in
his paperwork last night. His sister may have also found a troop,
since we have several Boy Scout/Girl Scout families.

So, in theory and now in practice, a web page can be a marketing
tool for your unit. But there are some important things to keep
in mind in designing your web page:

First of all, make sure that you identify where you are as well
as what you are. I've got a list of about a dozen nice web sites
that I can't tell where the Scouts live or meet. Make sure that
you include your city name and the state, province, or region.
Our new Scout was able to zero in on our web site in a one step
search because we had that info right up front where the search
engines can find it. Incidently, there are some web sites with
the city identified in a graphic, but guess what search engine
robots can't read?

Second, have a contact, either email or telephone. I recommend
that it be the Scoutmaster or another adult. And that person
should check his/her email regularly so they can respond to any
inquiries. There are now some email only services that are free
in exchange for receiving their adverstising. In our case, email
contact was made on Tuesday, and he was able to make it to the
meeting on Thursday. For many of those dozen web sites with no
place name, my emails to their webmasters have gone unanswered.

We are glad to have our new Scout, and we think he's going to have
a great time with us. Going through the regular channels (phone
call to the council, then more phone calls to the Scoutmasters,
maybe visiting a number of troops over a month or more), he would
have probably ended up with us anyway (that's just what another
Scout did this winter), but this way he found the best troop
right away and didn't miss out on any great trips!

YiS,

Alan R. Houser ** Scoutmaster, Berkeley Troop 24 ** troop24@emf.net
** WWW page ** http://www.emf.net/~troop24/t24.html **
Scoutmaster, Mt. Diablo Silverado Council Jamboree Troop #637

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