EOLS Online Strategy

eolseminars — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:29:33 +0000

The vast majority of our participants – volunteers, donors and ambassadors – are all tech savvy. Our goal is to make our program to be accessible to all members of our community: the sponsors that support our program, the students that attend our program, and the community that we live in. To meet this, our online presence needs to be available to all, and relevant to all. We’ve identified four key focus areas that we’ll be working on:

Access to information
With such a geographically massive territory to cover, online access to information is critical for our ongoing success. This means that we need to make it easy to find information. Our website provides information for: ambassadors, volunteers, donors, schools and parents. In addition, as a charity operating in your communities, it’s only fair that we share our regulatory filings. All of this information is currently available: www.eolseminars.ca. What information are you trying to find that we haven’ t made easy to get?
Social interaction
Our desire to become an overall contributor to leadership and volunteerism in Ontario has been thwarted by our inability to interact with the youth we want to be leading and interacting. With that in mind, we want to make interaction easier for our group. We’ve opened a twitter account, a facebook page, and this blog. How else do you want to interact with us?
Donations and Sponsorship
As part of an overhaul to the way we interact with our donors, we have made it easier to donate to us. The biggest is the ability to donate money online in two manners: Facebook Causes and CanadaHelps. Facebook Causes will accept donations right through Facebook and the money gets transferred right into our account. CanadaHelps is a Canadian charity that helps us collect online payments through their system. Both of these are very secure online portals. This will save the effort of mailing cheques (though we will certainly accept any cheques sent to us!). Do you feel comfortable donating online?
Online Registration
Finally, we want to use our web presence to reduce our costs. One of our significant costs is the printing and mailing of registration forms to ambassadors. By doing most of the registration online, we will be able to reduce our costs, do instantaneous registration, and share more information with ambassadors before the conference begin! Would this make it easier for you to enroll?

I hope that this gets you excited about the possibilities for a stronger online presence. Please use the discussion page to talk about these changes. I’m particularly interested in what you have to say about the questions I’ve bolded.

Eastern Ontario Leadership Seminars' Blog

EOLS Online Strategy