BMW CCA Conference Presentation April 15, 2008
Things have been so crazy around here I haven’t had a chance to post a note but two weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking at the BMW CCA Webmaster and Newsletter Editor conference in Salt Lake City. Every three years, the communication teams from chapters around the country come to share ideas, best practices and learn something new. This year was something of an initiation by fire as the club has a new Executive Director in the form of Frank Patek. The team from the National office including Linda Axelson did a great job of putting together materials, speakers and location for a worthwhile trip to Utah.
My presentation, “State of the (Tech) Union”, was a review of three key topics central to car clubs: content management, e-commerce and email. These are three technology cornerstones of nearly any member organization and car clubs are no different. Much like we preach with MotorsportReg.com, my emphasis was to focus limited resources to execute better on fewer things. There are so many great off-the-shelf tools today that are either free or very low-cost that webmasters should avoid reinventing the wheel and instead focus on driving value and functionality from existing community-supported software. My Gartner-style chart here depicts the difficult nature of custom software built on a part-time basis: the 80/20 rule can be relatively easy to achieve but there is a big gap before you reach professional, robust, complete software. It’s not an easy chasm to cross even with a full-time team and resources, let alone on a nights-and-weekends approach. The good news is with the tools available today, you rarely need to build much yourself.
You can download the slides here for anyone interested. Feedback is welcome!
Here are a couple of pictures from Jorge Rimblas from North Star BMW CCA:
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