Building an Online Community

Creating a sense of community amongst members, and between your members and your team, has many benefits:

• Add value to your existing members
• New services for prospective members
• Gather feedback on member sentiment
• Identify member issues earlier
• Increase member participation in events

Security

First, a word on security. Creating a sense of community amongst visitors is difficult without trust. By using Site Caddy to create password protected secure zones on your website, you members can feel free to communicate without worrying about eavesdropping. And members can choose to opt out of most services at any time - such as appearing in an online directory.

And as a website administrator, you will always have the ability to block any participants, or delete any content or messages, if necessary.

Discussion Forums

Allowing members to post their own messages, and reply to each other's messages, is a great way increase the dialogue! You create the forums and topics, and your members can create new conversations and post replies to any messages. Examples of forums might include:

• Golf equiment exchange
• Golf property exchange
• Member suggestion area
• Find a golf partner
• Discussions on rules
• Discussions on lessons and instruction
• Golf humour
• Or just for fun!

Member and Business Directories

Site Caddy can automatically build directory listings using the member data stored in your online address database. You choose the groups that appear in any directory, and the information to present. Even include photos! This is not only a great way for members to get to know each other, but it can also save your staff hours every month in time spent answering member requests for contact details for other members.

Each member can choose to opt out of directory services.

Surveys

Want to know what your members really think? Trying to decide where to allocate resources for the upcoming season? Need to poll your students?

With Site Caddy's new Survey Manager, you can build a simple or complex online survey in minutes, send a link to the survey via e-mail or SMS, and then track the responses in real-time.

Site Caddy's Survey Manager will be available in Summer 2011.

Online Contact Forms

Site Caddy includes contact form templates specifically pre-built for golf clubs and businesses:

• Club or society membership form
• New student form
• Handicap request form
• And many more...

Add a new contact form to your website in 5 minutes!

Social Networking

You may not be using social networking tools such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube... but millions of your members, students and potential customers are. We understand — it's hard to keep track of all the different sites, and there are only so much time you can dedicate to the web each month. Let Site Caddy be your central connection for all your social networking needs!

For a number of popular social networking sites like Twitter, you can display the content in your account with those sites automatically by connecting them to your Site Caddy site, and even post messages to those accounts from within your Site Caddy account. Aside from all the time you will save... think of all the extra passwords you won't have to remember!

For an example, look at our Twitter widget at the bottom of every page on this website. It is pulling in the tweets from our SiteCaddyGolf Twitter account!

Blog

So what is a blog anyway? And what's the difference between a blog and a website?

It's a popular question. A blog is very similar to a website, but typically a visitor can post a response to any page on a blog. With Site Caddy, you can have the best of both worlds - turn any page on your website in to blog, and allow authorised visitors to post a message or response.

Site Caddy's Survey Manager will be available in Summer 2011. But while we're waiting, why not visit the Site Caddy Golf Blog for a few ideas!