ASIS Chapter Website Preliminary Analysis
By: Steve Duell
Website Committee Chairman - Columbia River Chapter #064
Website Committee Member - San Francisco Bay Area Chapter #006
Congratulations! You have decided to consider creating a web site for your ASIS Chapter. That's Great!!!
Now comes the hard part, what do you want this web site to do for your Chapter? You have a lot of questions and you have no doubt that a lot more questions are going to come up before this is ready to go. You may not even have any idea of which questions to start asking first other than how much is this going to cost?
This information was created to help you with this developmental process and to provide you with useful information, practical solutions, and guidance in choosing the web site features that will help your Chapter. The goal of this document is not to try and convince you to buy everything possible, but rather to help you make sound decisions based on your Chapter's individual requirements and your Chapter's resources.
Let's begin by looking at some of the facts about your Chapter. Some basic questions to ask are:
- How many members do you have?
- Do you have room in your Chapter budget for a web site and its maintenance?
- Have you chosen a member who will be the point of contact for web site development?
- How many of your members have access to the Internet either at home or at work?
- Do you need a "rally point" for keeping in contact with members who may not always be able to attend meetings and for keeping them updated on changes within the Chapter?
- Will the site be used solely by Chapter members or will it be used as a marketing tool as well?
Okay, armed with these facts, let's now take a look at what sort of benefits you would like to get from this web site. As with most things in life, you will only get out of your web site what you are willing to put into it. In your case, this means how much web site content you want to make available. It also means that you must decide how interactive you want your web site to be. The difference between these two conditions determines the type of usefulness your web site will have.
Is a primarily informational web site any better or worse than a mostly interactive web site? Not really, it all depends on what meets your Chapter's needs. In the case of a Chapter with a large membership, a more interactive web site could be very helpful when it comes to things like registering for events or making credit card payments for Chapter dues (just to name a couple). These are both labor-intensive and time-consuming activities and a web site that processes this information for you will relieve a lot of the stress caused by these activities.
If your Chapter is one that does not need this level of interactivity, your members would probably find an information-focused web site much more preferable. Chapters like this can save a lot on their budget because there is very little actual web development. Your Chapter members that are generating the content to be placed within the web site are performing the majority of the work.
To try and determine the level of interactivity that would benefit your Chapter the most, let's go ahead and answer a few questions concerning interactive features that your web site could have.
- Would you want to be able to send out Group E-mail messages to your members with Internet access?
- Would you like for your members to be able to register themselves and their guests through the web site and have the registration information automatically and immediately e-mailed to your Hospitality chairman or some other responsible party?
- Would you like for your members to be able to pay for their event registrations with their credit cards through the web site?
- Would you like for your members to be able to have an online bulletin board style (BBS) chat area to help keep in contact with each other?
- Would you like for security employers to be able to provide you online with the necessary details about their job openings and have the registration information automatically and immediately e-mailed to your Placement chairman or some other responsible party?
- Would you like for your members to be able to quickly locate contact information about each other by using a search form?
- Would you like to protect some or all of your web site with password protection?
- Would you like to conduct periodic surveys on your web site to gather information about improvements, guest speaker or workshop feedback and suggestions, elections, and other topics?
- Would you like to have e-mail boxes set up that are specific to a Chapter position? (i.e., chairman@yourasischapter.org, vicechair@yourasischapter.org, etc. Form results, etc. can be e-mailed to these addresses and then it doesn't matter if a member changes their job or someone new assumes the role, the e-mail will still be retrieved by the correct person.)
- Do you want to network with other Chapters in your region regarding ASIS, CPP™, and security related events to share your information or promote each other?
The number of "Yes" answers to the questions above should give you a pretty good idea on a scale of 1-10 of the level of interactivity that you would like from your Chapter web site. Having an interactive web site is not an "either or" situation. It is simply an indicator of how much the web site is working for your Chapter as a tool or as an online library and/or notice board.
In some cases, the more interactive your web site is, the higher the maintenance costs are going to be, but that is not always the case. For instance, survey and certain form results being e-mailed or posting comments to your Chapter BBS are things automatically handled by the web site and do not require maintenance and therefore do not raise your maintenance costs.
If your web site will have a low amount of interactivity and you will be mostly adding "post and forget about it" type web content then your maintenance costs will depend on the frequency and quantity of your additional web pages and the amount of page/text formatting desired. A lot of textual content with a minimal amount of textual formatting is one way to keep web costs low.
Now let's ask some more questions to try and find out if a web site would reduce your Chapter costs.
- Would your Chapter benefit from online registrations and payments?
- Is your Membership Directory expensive to produce and distribute?
- Is your Chapter Newsletter expensive to create and distribute?
- Do you avoid including photographs in your publications because of the high printing costs?
- Do you ever need to quickly get a message out to all of your members?
- Do you frequently neglect to provide as much information as you have available because of the size and cost limitations?
- Would your sponsors be interested in additional sponsorship of (or on) the web site?
- Do you have members who are proficient in Adobe Acrobat and who are willing to create documents to be downloaded in lieu of creating web pages?
Your answers to the questions above should begin to give you a good idea as to whether or not a web site is a good economic choice for your Chapter. A web site can be a tireless workhorse when it comes to a variety of tedious tasks. It can also be a way for you to save your Chapter funds for more worthwhile projects than printing costs. (After considering all of this, you are probably sitting there already thinking of all the ways that a web site can reduce your operating costs by letting the web site replace some of your current practices.)
In some cases, you may find that with a Chapter web site you may now be able to offer information and services to your members that were previously either too expensive or labor intensive to merit serious consideration until now. A Chapter web site also offers a new level of participation for your members and a platform for CPPs™ to use toward recertification and education. In some respects, having a Chapter web site can bring major changes to your Chapter's interaction and involvement and there will always be those members who will balk at this new medium.
Cost is an important aspect of a Chapter web site, but it is justifiably overshadowed by the usefulness of a well-designed web site that is tailored to your Chapter's needs and whose involvement is kept in perspective. A Chapter web site only benefits those who have Internet access and if that is the only way that you make your information available, you may begin to alienate those without Internet access. A hidden cost of a Chapter web site could be the voluntary contributions of some members in your Chapter.
Okay, now that we have determined whether or not a web site is practical for your Chapter and we have a better idea of what we want this web site to do for your Chapter, the next step is to come up with an action plan for moving forward with your web site. Since a web site can be built in steps once you have a pretty good idea of what you want your web site to do, it is time to prioritize the features you want and then build a web development action plan based on your budget.
When developing your action plan, you should also take into consideration the learning curve of your members. It will take a while for some members to become accustomed to the idea of turning to the Chapter web site for information and as a way of registering for events, etc. You may wish to slowly add features to your web site until your members get used to the idea.
There will also be a learning curve when it comes to using the web site as a tool for committee members submitting reports or for thinking about turning to the web site for solutions for your Chapter activities. As you become more comfortable with this concept, your maintenance costs will probably go up after a while because you will eventually begin to more fully utilize this new tool and your membership will probably increase with time.
Developing your web site may only take a few days, developing your member's involvement and acceptance of the web site may take months. A Chapter web site is not a replacement for Chapter meetings and the personal networking that comes from face-to-face meetings. It is a supplement to your Chapter and a tool for helping your Chapter to provide additional benefits from their ASIS involvement. It is not recommended that you add features to your web site just because they are "cool". Your web site should be a useful tool that is both practical and easy to navigate.
Summary
This document is intended to help you with coming up with a decision on how to address the issue of a web site for your Chapter. The advice that I have offered here is based on experience with the development of two ASIS Chapter web sites and the feedback received from their members and officers.
Hopefully after reading this you will now have a good idea of how to proceed from here and we wish you and your Chapter the best of success in your Internet venture.
