NAMBA Propwash Web October 2022.pub

PROPWASH October 2022 23 once you reach critical mass, they become a very efficient engine for generating new membership. Finally, what you post in your ads is very important. You need to post interesting information about events, boats and information about our hobby to generate interest. Prior to this year, D20 used its Facebook page primarily for communication with other boaters both in and out of the district. The goal was to get as many “Likes” as possible with the belief that somehow that was going to generate new memberships and it just does not work that way. This year we let our members know that our Facebook page was now about marketing to new members and our messaging completely changed. This is not rocket science, but it does take commitment to make this work. If you are interested in what we have done here and would like to contact me about what I am doing, then please feel free to do so and I will be glad to share. One last comment: I had forgotten how magical a new member’s energy can be. This is especially obvious when you get a number of new members quickly. When these people engage, they are “all in”. All they want to do is talk about boats, run boats, and help with anything model boating. We have a gentleman who came to us from our Facebook advertising back in May. Since then he has been to two additional fun runs and races. He immediately got his NAMBA membership and he has been helping to do the race setup, be a pit man, or whatever we ask him to do, and he doesn’t even own a boat yet! I believe he has ordered a T2 Thunderboat from Insane! Announcing the NAMBA Race Entry System By David Santistevan NAMBA IT Chairman I have been waiting to make this announcement for some time now and today I am here to tell you that NAMBA now has its own Race Entry System. The need for this in NAMBA has been a long time coming and will be available to the member- ship as soon as next season. The software is functionally complete and is in full beta testing right now in D20. We will be running our District finals using the RES (Race Entry System) as an end-to-end test of the features and functionality. What is RES? RES or the NAMBA Race Entry System is a web based app that has two components. The race entry module and the race management module. The race entry system provides the ability for districts and clubs to create, publish and advertise their races anywhere in NAMBA. The race manage- ment module provides the ability to schedule, generate heats and score races both interactively as well as offline to be posted at a later time. We had the opportunity to really think outside of the box when developing this system. With the advancements in mobile devices, Internet access and others, we wanted to step back from the way things had previously been done and look at how we might do things a little better. I will be doing a series of articles about the RES in the future as we begin to roll this amazing system out. Below are some of the features we suspect will be in the final release. While nothing here is a guarantee of what features will be in the final release (standard disclaimer), you can expect to see most if not all of these features available to you! RES Features  RES is fully integrated with the NAMBA Membership Portal. You log in using your regular Portal credentials  RES supports scheduling for multi-day events with estimated heat counts that allow you to model your racing day and optimized your schedule.  Scheduling is done by simply dragging and dropping classes between days and your heat counts for those days are updated automatically.  Heats are generated using the “everyone gets to run against everyone else” approach using a randomized heat generator. Then the CD has the opportunity to fine tune those heats once again by dragging and dropping racers between heats.  RES fully supports the new NAMBA initiative to retire all frequencies other that DSM so there are no longer any requirements for frequencies.  Districts/Clubs may create race templates that may be used over and over again for information such as hotels, general race information etc.  When each race is created the club/district has the ability to completely customize the appearance of their race flyer including the use of HTML for an even more inspiring look.  Clubs and Districts will be able to have their races automatically pushed to social media such as Facebook and Instagram.  RES has taken advantage of SMS technology and clubs and districts can also send out race publishing notifications to member via text message. Members have the option to turn this off.  SMS will also actively be used by the race management module during races to call heats, report scoring and provide race announcements from the CD.  Scoring is entered at the end of each heat and immediately available to view on the site (where Internet service is available) and will be texted to all members along with current standings of each class.  Scoring and race highlights will be available for anyone who would like to follow a race or racer.  Historical scoring will also be keep on each driver so you can size up the competition! This is just a small sample of what is coming down the pipe with this system. Stay tuned for a lot more exciting information about this system and when it will be generally available. Follow us at https://50nats.com/ October 15-20, 2022 And on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/50Nats