BOF AGAIN

[Gross]

GB hosted a World Championship last week. No results or comments on the BOF website as of Monday morning. Not very good PR.

[Paul Frost]

Sorry to disappoint you Gross, but it's not their fault, I've only just sent them a report to publish.

As mentioned on the TrailO thread, manpower was pretty stretched at the event, with most of the organising team not getting home until later Sunday.
I got the report last night and uploaded it to the WTOC2012 website along with more photos from Day 1. But I was also busy uploading the RouteGadgets for the LAMM, which is why I didn't send the report until this morning.

[smf]

GB hosted a World Championship last week. No results or comments on the BOF website as of Monday morning. Not very good PR.

You don't seem to have bothered looking before posting as it is on the front page!

[mharky]

GB hosted a World Championship last week. No results or comments on the BOF website as of Monday morning. Not very good PR.

You don't seem to have bothered looking before posting as it is on the front page!

YOU don't seem to have bothered looking before posting as what is on the front page was a small preview mentioning that the World Trail Orienteering Championships takes place this week in Scotland. No results or comment as Gross mentioned.

SOFT already have 2 articles about WTOC on their website.

How long would it have taken for someone to look up the results and summarise the top 3 in the various classes each day?

They never did put anything up about EOC relay.

[Gross]

'Fraid it is BOF's fault! They hosted the World Championship, they are the National Governing Body & they have some responsibility for publicity.

[smf]

YOU don't seem to have bothered looking before posting as what is on the front page was a small preview mentioning that the World Trail Orienteering Championships takes place this week in Scotland. No results or comment as Gross mentioned.

YES I HAVE!

You can follow the action at http://www.scottish-orienteering.org/wtoc2012

Which has results and comment on WTOC2012.

[mharky]

Which would mean there were no results or comments on the BOF website, as Gross said.

World of O has an RSS feed from the BOF page, as I'm sure some British club websites do as well. It won't pick up when the WTOC page is updated as it is just part of the SOA website.

If however daily reports, even if a couple of lines long, were posted on the BOF site then they would come up on the feeds and increase their potential views by several thousands.

[Big Jon]

Mind you SOA page had nothing about Scottish Individual Champs on its front page, or the sprint and middle races. just a short note about the relays.
I'd have thought SOA might want to publicise its own championships - Maroc does not have anyone with the correct log in codes to place articles, otherwise we might have tried...

[andypat]

Big Jon
You're right - that's probably under my responsibility (officially as of last Saturday), although I cant fix it as currently I only have access to post under the Urban league. Paul Frost does an excellent job of keeping the website up to date, but I doubt he'd see it as his responsibility to create copy as such. Thats definitely something we need to be clearer on going forward.

In the short term I'll get something over to Paul and ask him to post it for me.

[Paul Frost]

The WTOC2012 items were shown on the SOA home page as they were posted. So the SOA RSS feed contained them and is picked up by world-of-o but is obviously not important enough to feature on the front page. I'll contact Jan to check on the feed to make sure it's still working correctly.

The Scottish Champs / Jubilee 5 website is subset of the SOA site, but the content was managed by the organisers after I set up the templates etc.
There weren't any reports published after each day that could have been shown on the SOA site, and there still aren't. But there is/was a featured block on the home page taking you to the event pages.

The WTOC2012 site was managed by me. It is hard to get reports when the people who know what to write are too involved in the organising to be able to stop and sit down to write something, hence why the reports came on Sunday night. I did pursue people that I saw taking photos and asked them to send them to me, and I did manage to get quite a few up each day later in the evening. I even tracked down that someone was sending reports to the IOF site (still don't know who) and so copy/pasted those onto the WTOC site until I could get original content.

But this highlights something I've raised time and again, you need copy writers for any large event. Someone not directly involved with the day to day organising/doing, that can stand back and look around, take photos, talk to competitors/winners and then write it up. Brooner is one of the few people I'm aware of that does this perfectly. It helps that he knows the people involved, so he is aware of the back story as well as what's going on.

[Freefall]

Always have a camera to hand and get photos downloaded as soon as possible. Thanks Paul for posting up the pictures I took - has anyone else noticed Neil MacLean's Japanese Doppleganger at the pre-start on Trail O Day 1?

[AndyO]

Neil MacLean's Japanese Doppleganger - now that's a phrase I never expected to hear - is it a track by Rage Against the Machine?

[kedge]

Looking at this thread, now that I'm finally home and rested, its worth restating for future events, that the BOF office staff, who are not usually orienteers themselves, are not clairvoyant and will not actively go looking for results from GBR teams competing overseas.

What they will do, however, is speedily post reports of such events sent to them by Team Managers, coaches etc.

At World Championships, these reports have in the past usually been sent by such a member of the support staff, some of whom have access to the website and can post directly. The TrailO team, having no such support, have usually concocted reports amongst themselves.

At WTOC 2012, as Paul Frost reported earlier, everyone was doing so many jobs, that this particular task took something of a back seat.

So, if

They never did put anything up about EOC relay.

that is probably because nobody from the team bothered to tell them

[AndyC]

I'll make one other relevant comment. BOF decided to only finance the Marketing Manager as a part time position so Caroline is only available (I think) 3 days a week. Now I suspect that she leaves instructions for others to support and post things onto the website but she won't always be able to anticipate what may happen or more input from her may be needed. (Obviously if others can produce high quality copy that problem is reduced)
This is not intended as a criticism of her (she seems to do a sterling job) but a reflection of the reality of a sport that isn't massively funded having to keep expectations realistic.
(cue BOF bashing again)

[AndyC]

After posting the above I went to the BOF website (actually to look up the White Rose details as I was told it has a Trail O event included) and I noticed the item on the new membership schemehttp://www.britishorienteering.org.uk/index.php?pg=1&action=news&id=MjQ3Mw==&rtn=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5icml0aXNob3JpZW50ZWVyaW5nLm9yZy51ay8=
We could have done with that at last nights Club Committee meeting.
I note that (after the debacle this year where we got younger rather than older) they are doing away with membership cards "because no-one ever asks to see them". I can remember presenting mine when I first started orienteering in the Midlands but very rapidly became recognised and so didn't bother.
Do I take it we all agree?