Following on the previous blog on Free Cloud Sport, we thought some examples of some pro bono work might be of interest.
We have quite a lot to do with inline hockey (sometimes known as ice hockey on inline skates) with our Gen Y sons and Gen Z daughter actively involved at club, state, national and international teams. So it will come as no surprise that we all spend quite a bit of time supporting sporting organisations like our local Pine Rivers Inline Hockey Club with pro bono work, especially in taking advantage of cloud services.
Sporting organisations are typically cash poor, and most administration and promotion is done by volunteers. So cheap options (or even better FREE) are essential.
A good example to illustrate the use of FREE promotional and communication tools is through the club’s website www.pineriversdragons.com.
It was designed by our Gen Y son over a weekend using free WordPress. He used a simple uncluttered design and created the core template, from which others provide the content using WordPress simple content management. Of course the club had to pay for the url (about $200).
As with most websites, content is king (“The Internet .. allows information to be distributed worldwide at basically zero marginal cost to the publisher.” Bill Gates, 1996).
So the website has very rich content, maximising FREE cloud services and capabilities wherever possible – about the club, key contacts (links to email addresses), location (use of Google map), sponsors (link to sponsors’ websites), lots of photographs (using Flickr), videos (using YouTube), RSS and other subscription services, contact email (using Hotmail).
Using Google Analytics, we analyse the number of visits, pageviews, traffic sources and referring sites.
A Learn Inline Hockey suite of videos was presented and produced by our Gen Y sons as part of a uni assignment. Used for the purpose of sharing their knowledge of inline hockey and promoting the sport and the club, in about 12 months the videos have been viewed over 14,726 times
The club shares its referee roster with all referees using Google docs and it is the responsibility of each referee to nominate and check when they are rostered for games.
For the future the club might use other cloud services like Survey Monkey to gauge what content people want or shopping cart to pay for merchandise or registration fees.
These are just a few examples where sporting clubs and other not-for-profit organisations can really provide up-to-date content for minimal outlay – it’s just the time and effort of volunteers to keep the content fresh.
Email, calendar, rostering, scheduling , video training, picture archive, web content management – organisations are paying thousands even millions to deploy these features to their employees using inhouse services instead of the cloud.
Because they don’t believe they can expose their info to the cloud.
But they are anyway – their employees are forwarding emails, calendar attachments, web content etc through their personal services to the scary outside world. Unis sent student email to the cloud because most of their students were doing it already, through personal accounts.
Because the outside services are not just cheaper but also better, more agile with innovation, more open to collaboration, better secured eg from spam.
Large orgs waste mIllions of $ on inferior internal duplication of IT services, available readily in the cloud, for decreasingly plausible justification.
They used to say “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”. Maybe the same kind of fear, uncertainty and doubt is what is holding the large and conservative, with money to waste, back from using the cloud. They can afford FUD.
Good time for SMEs – they can use the advantage cloud brings to their early adoption to counter the scale advantage large organisations have but are wasting on cloud FUD.