scouting ireland on twitter

I couldn't let the year to by without a small post, you know, to get the 2011 date activated in the blog archive! I decided that I'd talk once again about Scouting Ireland and a topic close to my heart, Twitter.

Timeline of Events:
September 2007: I started the @ScoutingIreland twitter account. I planned to use it to publish the news from the website onto twitter.
October 2008: I managed to get the account set up to tweet news from scouts.ie. It took a fair bit of work to figure out how to get the news from the static page to an RSS feed and in turn onto Twitter.
October 2010: New website and RSS feed launched! (Which I blogged about here!) After my hard work, I could change the RSS feed to the official one.
April 2011: I handed the account over to National Office. I was contacted and gave up the account to the Communications Team. Up to this point I gained about 1,300 followers.
April 2011: I set up another account, @IrishScouting and began the process again of pulling the news from the website into twitter. The account provided me (at least) with the official news from the site.
December 2011: @ScoutingIreland (the official account) has about 1,900 followers and steadily growing each day. @IrishScouting (unofficial) has about 80 and not gaining many each week.

I've looked at both these accounts and took a snapshot of that last 3 months to compare how well Scouting Ireland is looking after the account they made me give up. I was promised they had a plan and was told the account would be put to good use as part of the new Communication Plan.

Stats from @ScoutingIreland over the last 3 months:
Total Tweets: 64
Direct news from the website tweets: 15
Retweets from other accounts: 2
Test Tweets: 1
Replies: 1
Random, not official news Tweets: 4
Tweets from Group Leaders Conference: 41

Number of official news items from the website that was not published on their official feed: 22


And yes, those 22 were published on @IrishScouting!

new scouts.ie website

Before I begin, this isn't a dig at anyone in particular. This is me talking about Scouting Ireland. I'll also state that I'm not perfect nor is neting I do!

Scouting Ireland relaunched their new Scouts.ie website yesterday. This new website will be the public facing, what's scouts about and how do I join for the public to view and get information. This website has also been finished for the last number of weeks, waiting a whole big unveiling at a Group Leaders conference this weekend. So they should be well prepared for their 16:15 launch, which eventually went live at 16:45ish.

I have seen many new websites go live, been involved in many go lives and even had the pleasure of testing, breaking and proofing website before launch. Standard practice, get people to test and look over your website, usability test etc etc. It seems that there wasn't many people left into the inner circle of testing this new website. I will go through some of the things I came up with on a 30 minute quick look through the site last night:

Typos typos everywhere

I found a total of 25 typos on a website that contains about 30 pages. In no particular order:

1 & 2 - On the National Management Committee page.

3 to 6 - On the Professional Staff page.

7 - On the Parental Information page.

8 & 9 - On the Campsite Locator page.

10 - On the homepage page.

11 & 12 - On the Join Today page.

13 to 15 - On the History of Scouting Ireland page.

16 & 17 - On the One Programme page.

18 - On the Cub Scouts page.

19 - On the Scouts page.

20 & 21 - On the Venture Scouts page. 

22 & 23 - On the Benefits of Join page in the Leaders section. 

24 & 25 - On the Why become a Leader page. 

Broken / Formatting Errors

Here are some of the things that I found didn't work as expected or there was a formatting issue

1. That Huge Banner doesn't link correctly. On the home page it links correctly to Beavers, Cubs and Scouts but click on the Ventures Banner and your directed to Rovers and click on the Rovers links to Leaders. The Leaders Banner is usually the first one that loads and it doesn't link anywhere. Also If you miss the banner, there is no way to go back, you have to wait until it goes around again.

On any section page, for example Venture Scouts, the banner rotates with different Venture Scout images and click to find out more (Why would I want to click when I'm on the page?), but they say Ventures and then link to the other sections, Beavers Cubs etc..

2. Section or Recent News. Every section page, Beavers to Leaders has their own Recent news box, which should contain news for that section. In this example, Cub scout news contains Venture Scout news. There is also a Read more Section News, which should bring you to loads of other Cub Scout News, but it fails and just brings you to the article about Challenge 2010.
Ok, there is a lack of news as the site just launched, but there could be a place holder Cub news for their section?

3. Formatting in Other Links. Again, a little formatting hiccup that should have been picked up straight away.

4. Contact Page. This is perhaps the worst designed page on the site. First off they seem to want to SHOUT about GROUP and CHILD PROTECTION POLICIES. Then there is a nice map, but no location placed on it. Sure National Office is somewhere there, but where? Then I only noticed it out of the corner of my eye, there is a contact form (with an missing image). There was no mention of filling out a form on the page, it is just there!

5. Group Locator page. When you click on a group, you get a nice balloon popping up with details of the group. It is however butt ugly with scroll bars. Format it correctly please!

Final Thoughts

On the design of the site, I think the banner is too big, the duplicating of the groups and ages on the main page takes up far too much space. There is no RSS for the latest news and no social media integration (HUGE opportunity missed here). I believe the correct term is Scouters not Leaders as National Office has drilled up for the past few years, but decided to let it slide on their national website. 

Ok, it is a website for the general public and we will have to wait until next Wednesday to see the amazing my.scouts.ie website for actual members to use. Overall it does its job but there is a lot of really bad mistakes. I've been trying to look at it in the mind of a potential youth member or parent and hopefully it will increase members and raise the profile of Scouting.

nct

My car is due its NCT on Wednesday morning. I had a look at the NCT website and they publish their test stats, showing how many tests took place and the pass rate. What I found really interesting was that it doesn't change from one year to the next. Take a look at the graph I did comparing their data and the consistency between years:

I have about exactly 51% chance of passing first time. If I fail, I will have about exactly 90% chance of passing.
It will be interesting on Wednesday if I am in the lucky 51% or the unlucky 48% (±1%)

bye bye rte

On Friday I handed control of all the RTÉ twitter accounts back to RTÉ.

After what happened in the previous post, I didn't want the same happening to all the other accounts. I counted that there was over 15,000 people following all the different accounts I had running. So after a quick tweet or two to Mr. O'Shea, I found who I should be contacting about the transfer of details.

I got a two sentence email back from them four days later:

Dear Darran,
Thank you very much your email. We are happy to take over the ownership of these accounts and will appreciate if you send us all necessary details.
Best regards,

After over two years of providing the service and not abusing the names or the accounts for my own gain (quite easy to embed my own advertising into the feeds) or just holding onto them and doing nothing with them, all I got from RTÉ was that two sentence, poorly written email.

I sent over all the log in details and after a couple of days downtime the accounts have started spewing out news once again. Already there are problems with their new account feeds, which I would have picked up on and fixed straight away... lets see how @RTE_WebDesign handle it :-)

P.S. Can you change the email address on all the account or I might forcefully take them back!