Donations Needed To Secure AW Website For The Next Decade
There’s simply no better, more popular resource than the American Whitewater website for paddling and river stewardship information. This value is reflected in the incredible amount of usage our site sees with over 800,000 page views a month serving thousands and thousands of river enthusiasts every day. What’s more, all this content is completely free!
Now, we need your help to fund an overhaul of this incredible resource so we can serve our users for the next decade. We’re calling on all website users and river enthusiasts, whether you’re an AW Member or not, to make a tax-deductible donation to support a deeply needed update of our website.
Donate Today
- Fill out our online donation form
- Put “website” in the comments field
Benefits of the New Website
We’re excited to report that our new site will have some awesome features that users will love and that our small organization desperately needs. Just to name a few:
- Responsive design; site works across any device size (e.g. phone, tablet, desktop etc.)
- Mapping interface to explore river data
- Content that can be easily edited and contributed to by anyone
- Professional design and usability
- Based on popular, open-source software
- Underlying software widely supported by multiple vendors
- Easily extensible underlying architecture
- Paid third-party services pragmatically used
- Focused functionality that our organization can affordably support
How we Spend Your Money
Donors will be glad to know that here at AW we take a relentless, methodical approach to carefully managing our funds. In fact, we’ve been recognized by Charity Navigator for four straight years with their highest rating of four stars. That’s a performance that only 6% of other charities can claim! With eighty four cents out of every dollar we receive going direct to our mission work (a top performance amongst non-profits), you can be confident in your donation.
Full Project History
Over the last three years, the staff and Board of Directors behind American Whitewater have been taking a deep dive into overhauling our website and online tools. This project is not taken lightly; it’s a significant commitment of resources that has long-term implications on how we communicate with our members and users. Our website, by a significant margin, is the most popular face of the organization. It sees an incredible amount of traffic with over 800,000 page views per month. Most of the traffic visits the national river database for river descriptions and river levels.
These web services were first developed by volunteers starting in the mid to late 90’s and they have been expanding ever since. Much like a house that has been remodeled and added to over time, our website has seen contributions from multiple developers with a variety of skillsets and preferred technological approaches. Although we’re proud of the site these efforts have built, this approach has led to a site that has some challenges when it comes to design, user experience, information architecture, ease of modification and user contribution.
The American Whitewater Board of Directors made resolving these website challenges a high level priority in late 2010. Their goal was to intelligently and pragmatically address the issues we were experiencing and to develop a website solution for the next decade of the organization.
The first step in this process was getting an independent, professional assessment of our current website, including recommendations on how to address the issues we had identified. We selected a firm to perform this audit in late 2010. To ensure their impartiality, our contract dictated that they would be ineligible to perform any work that their findings may recommend.
This audit was completed in early 2011 and recommended that we rebuild our website from the ground up rather than attempt to modify our current, custom solution. Additionally, this audit recommended that whichever team we selected to perform this overhaul we should endeavor to complete the entire project with one team at one time.
To further augment our audit and careful website research we conducted a web survey of site users in Spring 2011, garnering over 2,000 responses. The survey results were not surprising; users highly valued the river data and were interested in mobile access and more robust mapping. The results also indicated that our river stewardship information is important to visitors, but not the primary driver of most traffic.
With the information gained from the website audit, survey results and American Whitewater staff and Board input, we constructed a request for proposal (RFP) with help from the original audit firm. We received 51 responses, each of which we methodically reviewed and whittled down over time to a top ten and then to a top four finalists. These four finalist firms and their respective proposals were taken to our Board of Directors in the spring of 2012.
At that 2012 Board Meeting, our Directors reaffirmed the American Whitewater website as a top organizational priority and directed staff to undertake a project to overhaul it consistent with the audit recommendations. American Whitewater selected Confluence Corporation as our vendor to perform this overhaul and work began shortly thereafter.
Throughout this entire project, we’ve focused carefully on managing our expenses and on the quality of the end product. While this approach may lead to a longer timeline, we’re confident in the investment and the end result. To these ends, we’ve made a point to use common, open source technologies whenever appropriate while also taking advantage of reasonably priced third-party services or solutions. This approach ensures our website will be easily improved and cost effectively maintained for years to come.
Additionally, we’ve taken a pragmatic approach to which website features our future site will have. This means that after careful consideration, we elected to drop some unpopular features from the current site so we could concentrate on high quality execution of other, high-value features. In the same vein, we intend our long-term website development process to be iterative. We will start with a high quality base and then judiciously build and improve on it over time.
Our goal is to launch this new site to our Membership in the Fall of 2014. We also plan to invite Members to help us beta test and provide feedback on the site before launching it. As with any project of this size, there are bound to be some hiccups. So please bear with us as we work to overcome glitches and improve functionality during testing and after launch. Member and volunteer contributions have always been a cornerstone of American Whitewater and with this new website we believe that it will be easier than ever to do.
We’re confident that our methodical and pragmatic approach will result in a website we can all use and point to with pride - for many years to come!
Donate Today
Think of all the incredible days on the river you’ve had because of our website. Or, think about all the river stewardship information you’ve learned from our extensive stewardship and access database. We know our organization and website have brought a ton of value into the lives of our users and now we need our users’ support in return. Please make a tax-deductible donation today:
- Fill out our online donation form
- Put “website” in the comments field
Thanks!