710 – Harnessing Youth to Build New Clubs
Harnessing Youth to Build New Clubs
Ellie Ovrom with her Drent and her All American dog.
Host Laura Reeves is joined by Ellie Ovrom, Drentsche Patrijshond enthusiast, who has helped found two brand new clubs with just five years involved in the sport.
“As I got more interested in purebred dogs and in performance sports,” Ovrom said, “I got involved with existing clubs and organizations around me, or in the case of the breed club, the national club, and as I was getting involved, I started to realize that some of the way that things were being done was not necessarily in alignment with my values and interests.
“And not only that, but I was making connections with other folks in those organizations who felt very similarly. And rather than lean into conflict, which is I think unfortunately what ends up happening a lot in dog clubs, we realized that there’s space for all of us and we just want to enjoy the dogs.”
A project manager by trade, Ovrom noted that “a lot of the key skills of a project manager align really well with working in dog clubs or any volunteer organizations, frankly. It’s a lot of managing process and managing people. So particularly in founding two new nonprofit organizations, we had to figure out OK, what is needed, in what order and how do we do this most efficiently and most effectively and try our best to get it right the first time. We don’t always, but we try to get it right the first time, every time.
“Nobody’s getting paid for this. We’re all doing it because we love it. And but people are busy. They have lives, they have families, they have their real jobs. How do you capitalize on people’s skill sets and their passion without burning them out and building community at the same time?
“I think we’ve had things that have worked and things that have not worked, but recognizing that the intent of everybody is good is, I think the basic approach that I try to take is everyone’s doing their best or wants to do their best. How can you help people achieve that is what I try to do.”
612 – Clubistry: Websites Designed for Dog Clubs
Clubistry: Websites Designed for Dog Clubs
Host Laura Reeves is joined by Jennifer Johnson and Brent Wiethoff from Dialogs who have created and are building a service called Clubistry. The service designs websites specifically for dog clubs.
“Younger generations are not as keen to join clubs,” Johnson said. “They don’t always really know that there are parent clubs or that there might be a value to, or something that they can gain from joining their national parent club. And part of fighting that is to have an online presence and online applications.
“We see a lot of people who don’t want to download a PDF. If I have to mail something, I have to go find a stamp. I have to find an envelope. I don’t know where they are. I don’t use them very often anymore on purpose. Moving applications to an online form helps increase the number of applicants you get because you can fill it out all in one step and submit it at it’s done as opposed to, ‘that looks like something I want to do, but I’ve had to download this and now I have to cook dinner. So I’m just gonna set this aside’. And then they never get back to doing that thing.
“A Facebook presence or other online platforms becomes more important these days because this is where people go to find out about information and there’s a lot of bad information on social media. So it’s… really important for clubs to have an official presence on social media. So they have a voice. They have an official representation and an official voice. You can’t really ever stop the bad voices, but if you are not one of the voices, then all they hear is the bad stuff.
“Anybody can spin up a WordPress website and you buy a template and then you start dropping your own content into it and it breaks. The design breaks. It looks bad. It doesn’t look good on mobile. The person who had the login information leaves the club or your volunteer moves on to other things. Or you’ve hired somebody off of Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace to do the work for you. And now they’ve gone on to college or a girlfriend or a different life and are no longer available.
“Domain names, you register your domain name, somebody in your club registers your domain name. And then it was 30 years ago and nobody knows who it was that did it. I have seen clubs lose their domain entirely because they don’t know who has the login information for it, and then it gets purchased by somebody else to be held for ransom for a large amount of money.
“Same with the websites, somebody built it, nobody knows who or nobody has the login information anymore. Volunteers die or move on to other things. All these things happen. We’ve heard all these stories. We’ve got our roster in an Excel sheet, and you have one person who’s in charge of the roster, but they have another person that’s helping them with it. Now you have two copies of the roster.”
For more on this great service, listen in to the entire episode!