Making our Club visible on the web

gkainz

gkainz

Final Approach
Joined
Feb 23, 2005
Messages
8,401
Location
Arvada, CO
Display Name
Greg Kainz
Home Airfield
KBJC
Looking for suggestions/ideas to make our club more visible on the web. When we have openings, we've posted here, on craigslist, Colorado Pilots Association, AOPA, and word of mouth. We just recently created a Facebook page, but hesitation by some members of non-facebookers have us keeping it private for now.

Thoughts? Ideas? Where would you search if you were looking for a club?

Thanks!
Greg
 
gkainz said:
Looking for suggestions/ideas to make our club more visible on the web. When we have openings, we've posted here, on craigslist, Colorado Pilots Association, AOPA, and word of mouth. We just recently created a Facebook page, but hesitation by some members of non-facebookers have us keeping it private for now.

Thoughts? Ideas? Where would you search if you were looking for a club?

Thanks!
Greg
Click to expand...

Bulletin boards at the airport(s) I want to base out of.
 
gkainz said:
Looking for suggestions/ideas to make our club more visible on the web. When we have openings, we've posted here, on craigslist, Colorado Pilots Association, AOPA, and word of mouth. We just recently created a Facebook page, but hesitation by some members of non-facebookers have us keeping it private for now.

Thoughts? Ideas? Where would you search if you were looking for a club?

Thanks!
Greg
Click to expand...

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIN work. You will need to actively post on them and make them not private (kind of contradicts what you are trying to do). Post lots of pictures of activities.
 
If it were me, I would get a domain name and put up a simple webpage.

You can accomplish something very similar with a public Facebook page, but with a customer base that I would think has a lower-than-average rate of Facebook users, a traditional webpage may be beneficial.

It's not very expensive. It would allow you to put a web address on any flyers or advertisements—giving potential members a place to get more information, see better pictures, etc. It would also give you a portal for a web-based scheduling system, should your club consider one down the road.

I have zero experience in aircraft/club marketing, so take my advice with a grain of salt, but that's what I'd do, in combination with the other avenues.
 
bqmassey said:
If it were me, I would get a domain name and put up a simple webpage.

You can accomplish something very similar with a public Facebook page, but with a customer base that I would think has a lower-than-average rate of Facebook users, a traditional webpage may be beneficial.
Click to expand...

http://www.tenhiflyers.com - it ain't much, it ain't my work, but it's there ... "Dammit Jim, I'm a DBA not a Web designer."

bqmassey said:
It's not very expensive. It would allow you to put a web address on any flyers or advertisements—giving potential members a place to get more information, see better pictures, etc.

It would also give you a portal for a web-based scheduling system, should your club consider one down the road.
Click to expand...
we're using http://www.aircraftclubs.com for that.

bqmassey said:
I have zero experience in aircraft/club marketing, so take my advice with a grain of salt, but that's what I'd do, in combination with the other avenues.
Click to expand...

Thanks!
 
If your club is full most of the time, I think you don't need to do too much more. Most of your leads are going to come from web traffic, so make sure you are coming up in web searches.
 
Thanks, Kent. We started our facebook page after I saw yours. :) Have you generated any leads or interested candidates from Facebook?

Andrew - our club is always full ... which is what presents the issue ... to leave the club (in good standing and recover your share cost) someone needs to join and buy your share. Hence, when we have a member who wants to leave, we're helping them generate potential new members or leads to take their place.
 
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gkainz said:
Thanks, Kent. We started our facebook page after I saw yours. :) Have you generated any leads or interested candidates from Facebook?
Click to expand...

Well... Uh... I'm really not sure! But I'll take members any way we can get 'em, the more members we have the easier it is to buy another new plane. :D
 
Scantilly clad, good looking women on your webpage. You know, posing like they are members. Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth, but hey, it's advertising.

Just sayin.
 
Greg, when Tiara Flyers was a going concern here in Colorado it was by far one of the largest non-profit flight clubs I've ever seen around here. (I ended up club Secretary for a short while until it folded after it was forced off of KFTG by politics and airport by-laws that were silly.)

At one point they had almost 125 members in the early 90s, three aircraft. The nicest Skyhawk and Cutlass for 300 miles around (prior to McAir buying some of the first restart Cessnas) and a well maintained older Mooney M-20C.

The weirdest part was at least 70% of the members didn't fly. I think that was a harbinger of times to come back then. People were already setti aside aviation as not something they could afford in their budgets.

They were almost 100% word-of-mouth. And the vast majority of that was from CFIs who wanted to teach in their (nice well-maintained and reasonably priced) aircraft.

Most of the word of mouth was via two methods. CFIs and Metro Aviation students. CFIs liked the aircraft and the rates and got some kind of deal on membership and dues. Lots of otherwise unaffiliated CFIs not tied to specific flight schools at FTG, APA, and BJC found the club as the only place they could bring students. Something to think about there. Many of the local clubs back then and perhaps still today only have "staff" CFIs around here. Finding rentals that'll take independent CFIs was difficult back then. (The only other place that would do it was KEIK after Aurora Airpark closed.)

Mind you, this wasn't a buy-in organization as much as yours is. Members did buy into the club but not the aircraft. So it's different. My last job as Secretary when it was voted to close up shop after medical and personal reasons forced one of the owners to sell two of the aircraft, was to mail equal checks of all remaining funds to all current members. Sad day. I kept the paperwork around for a number of years thinking that a non-profit flight club was a significantly different entity that I'd probably never see again. Then tossed it all. I did keep the old "official seal" that embossed paper documents in the club records and it's out in the garage. I heard that the other owner is still flying an Ercoupe at APA and I'd like to gift it back to the two owners sometime when I can get them in the same location.

I found the club after I saw a flyer at school then asked around and "everyone" seemed to know about Tiara. I joined, flew the crap out of the Cutlass, and liked the place so much I volunteered to run for Secretary. Secretary was the bad job on the Board. You were the guy mailing out all the monthly mailings and running the mail merge software (AppleWorks, by the way...). Busy. Small perks by the aircraft owners were common like "follow me over to APA in the Skyhawk so I can drop off the Cutlass for 100-hour and fly me back, my treat."

Also flew the Mooney a bit. Found out that the owner is six or so hangars down from me now at APA. Was great to run into him.

Looking back I'd say the keys were the CFIs and the continuous flow of students from Metro. Not sure how that translates into an ownership club unless you take on a lot more members at a fairly low price, though.

No matter how you do it though, CFIs are how word of mouth gets around at airports. I did learn that. Almost every membership call I got asking for an info packet was from either a Metro student or someone referred by a CFI.
 
P.S. I recently learned that Murphey's hangar was where the Cutlass lived. Went to meet up out there and after a few minutes of Deja Vu, I realized why I recognized Murphy's hangar. I virtually lived in it for a couple of years. Haha. Okay, not really, but I was out there a lot.

All those extra electrical J-boxes around the walls had a purpose. The owners demanded that if you tracked anything into the aircraft you vacuumed it out and of course, cleaned all the bugs off. Not doing so was grounds for membership termination. The plugs all around were so you could reach everywhere with the vacuum cleaner. ;)
 
We have a web page, www.lolflyingclub.com a Facebook page that doesn't get used much and a link on the airports webpage. Of course word of mouth and two very nice airplanes as well as limiting membership to 15 members helps. We aren't the cheapest but you can get a plane almost anytime you want and they are both well equipped IFR planes. Flyers in the bathroom at the hangers and of course in the FBOs.

Mike
 
Thanks, all. Nate, ironically I am now the secretary of TenHi Flyers ... fortunately with the improvements in the innerwebz there's much less mailmerge kind of stuff going on. Although I will not be able to live with myself until I get some of the official club documents out of clarisworks and into pdf docs... :)
 
The problem with having more than one "webhome" is keeping them all up to date. I did a google on a local club and found three or four sites, including a facebook page, all with stale data, the facebook page being the less stale. I'm not sure who is responsible for the pages but they all need attention or they need to be removed.
I don't like facebook. Sure, it might be an easy way to get a presence on the web but for some content, you need to be a member. And really, do people have that much to talk about, that important, they need to be updating their wall all day long?
And once you're a member, you attract messages and emails you don't want. Then again, just having email is enough to attract spam. Facebook seems to "authorize" it.
No.... I don't want to "friend" you, probably not even acknowledge I know you.
Now go away and let me go on being the old curmudgeon I am.
 
LOL. Curmudgeons are good. Reality check.

The key to using social media for business is automation. Those updates are created once, copy is checked through Legal, and stored until a timer kicks them out to all the social media sites silultaneously for most companies.

The "Wall Post" thing is more a tool to stay in touch with seriously far flung friends (think wildly different time zones here) than anything. That and it aggregates news that caught the attention of like- minded folk so you don't even have to look for it.

Most of the time, Twitter (#1 by far), PoA, or Facebook links beat even the daily Aviation News sites by two to three days on most stories now.

The Russian crash was on Twitter only a couple hours afterward for English speakers, probably much sooner for Russian speakers. Reno crash was minutes. Etc.

I got an e-mail today with the text of that 787 training thing -- that was posted here almost two weeks ago -- and most of those e-mails say "First I've seen this!".

I gave up mentioning they're a couple weeks late unless they already know about PoA. If they do, I send 'em the three page and growing discussion/post URL.

AvWeb scoops most other sites as a traditional style news outlet.

EAA has significantly more content than anyone else on a wider array of topics.

AOPA is where I read month-old news usually. ;)

Twitter is nearly-real-time but unvetted and works its way toward accuracy fairly quickly -- but takes a few hours. The discussions bring out fact-checkers who clarify on the fly.

FB seems to be where announcements of aviation events hit first.
 
Creating a club site is easy. Registering a domain is cheap and easy also. Make sure you actually register it separately from your hosting (so you can take it with you if you change hosts). For registering, I've always used http://gkg.net but there are certainly others out there.

Keeping your site up to date can be an issue, but if you use a cms (content management system) framework your life will be considerably easier. Just log in and change your info. -- WordPress, Joomla, Drupal are all good for that.

I'm sure if you ask, you'll get lots of advice about creating your website. I'd be more than happy to provide advice. Although, If you do not want to deal with the setup of your site, I'd be more than happy to do it (for a donation to my Flight Training fund) :yesnod:.
 
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