Increasing awareness and relevance of GAGB

[sandvika]

In the other thread discussing recent events with Groundspeak I advocate that GAGB should come of age and assume governance for caching in UK.

Link to other thread

I wanted to make a brief assessment of where GAGB is now. The findings are somewhat discouraging.

According to GAGB forums, there are 2785 members of whom 193 are active.

According to GEOCACHEUK.COM, 25048 cachers have cached in the last year, 6047 in the last month.

So, basically, GAGB is not yet reaching the majority of UK cachers and there is some way to go to increase awareness and relevance.

The obvious way of doing this is to add hyperlinks to GAGB to your cache listings. This ought not to be any more inoccuous than adding GEOCACHEUK.COM stats to your listings.

I will do this to our UK listings - I urge you all to do the same.

Roderick Parks (sandvika)

[muttoneer]

I would like to agree with the comments posted in the other thread. This is the ideal opportunity for the GAGB to seize the initiative and broaden its appeal amongst UK cachers. Since all the fuss started over on the Groundspeak forum I have been checking in here more and more, and I can't be the only one who's suddenly coming back to this forum after pretty much ignoring it since signing up!
Especially now its on a newer and better platform and talks seem to be afoot to separate GAGB membership from forum usage, this forum stands very well placed to take over from the Groundspeak one as the central point for information and discussion for UK caching - and not just Groundspeak caching either.

[molfrew-mosstoad]

Yep agree with whats been said. I think this may have been discussed before a long time ago?
Perhpas one of those techy types could do a link/logo that we could copy & paste into our cache pages.... pretty please

[Bill D (wwh)]

We have a page of links here.

[Belplasca]

According to GAGB forums, there are 2785 members of whom 193 are active.

According to GEOCACHEUK.COM, 25048 cachers have cached in the last year, 6047 in the last month.

So, basically, GAGB is not yet reaching the majority of UK cachers and there is some way to go to increase awareness and relevance.

Aren't you making a rather unfair comparison here?

Of those 25048 cachers, how many have posted on ANY online caching forum?

That's the figure to compare with...

Bob

[molfrew-mosstoad]

We have a page of links here.

Thanks thought there must be some

[markandlynn]

https://img.geocaching.com/user/124791_400.jpg

what about the clickable images

nb the one above would be nice to have a gagb version like this.

[StuartP]

Hi All,

We're investigating a logo based solution, please bear with us.

Cheers

Stuart

[molfrew-mosstoad]

I like the idea of a logo link, it catches the eye better on a web page

[sandvika]

Aren't you making a rather unfair comparison here?

Of those 25048 cachers, how many have posted on ANY online caching forum?

That's the figure to compare with...

Bob

No, it's merely indicative, you can't compare as they are not alike. I don't even know what the GAGB forum considers "active" or whether the recent fix has affected this. If we could get just 10% of active UK cachers active on this forum, it would however be a significant improvement!

Cheers, Roderick

[Belplasca]

No, it's merely indicative, you can't compare as they are not alike. I don't even know what the GAGB forum considers "active" or whether the recent fix has affected this. If we could get just 10% of active UK cachers active on this forum, it would however be a significant improvement!

Cheers, Roderick

I'd be very surprised if 10% of active cachers are active on ANY forum!

Most active cachers are very happy just going out for a walk every so often, with a cache or two along the way. They'll only join a forum when they are looking for information.

Activity on forums is just not necessary in order to be an active cacher.

Bob

[Bill D (wwh)]

sandvika wrote:
I don't even know what the GAGB forum considers "active" or whether the recent fix has affected this.

It appears that the recent move to the new forum software has affected this. According to the stats in the admin control panel, we had no visitors to our forums before the move, so the "active" figure will be those who've visited since then. Effectively, the count started again from scratch when we moved.

[fraggle69]

Just added a clickable logo link to the GAGB site from each of my cache pages. It looks pretty cool, think I'll add a UK flag to the right and my team logo to the left lol.

[hazels]

Can I add something here?

I don't know why people don't come in here more often, but I can perhaps tell you why I haven't been in much?

Quite simply, I don't know what GAGB do! I like to think I'm a very active cacher - active in the sense that I cache lots, plus that I'm active on the social side too. I read John Stead's sig line that says "Happy to be member of GAGB" and I add - I am too - but I don't know what you do!!

Am I just being daft?

[Bill D (wwh)]

Hazel, there's a post here by nobbynobbs (Matt, one of our committee members), which I think sums it up pretty well. A little of it isn't quite relevant, as it was a reply to another question, but it's still a pretty good summary.

[hazels]

ahhh Thanks!!! :socool: