Camp Mohawk
Pro bono publico
I first came across Camp Mohawk when they were the guest at an LDC charity event. Camp Mohawk were appealing for sponsorship and donations. Rather than handing over cash I went and had a chat with them to see if there was anything that BigSoft Limited could provide that might help them.
After discussing a few ideas it became obvious that their web infrastructure was too complicated for them to maintain. It was a standard scenario, they had an external person who did all their web work. Camp Mohawk would typically email them and request changes to the web site. Those changes would take anything up to a month to be serviced. As a result the web site was just a set of pages relating to the charity, as opposed to a resource for the people visiting the camp.
Here at BigSoft Limited we are all about empowerment. We want you to be able to run your web site yourself. Of course we can do i.t. for you but it's usually better for you to cut out the middle man and do it yourself. After assessing the level of technical expertises at the charity we opted for an extremely simple online web site editing content management system. BigSoft Limited took their original web site and recreated it using this new system. BigSoft Limited took on their domain name needs (DNS) and organised their re-direction to the new servers.
Their previous email infrastructure consisted of a shared Hotmail account that everyone used. We brought them over to Google Apps for Charities, created an individual email address for each of the 15 staff and a shared address for initial contact. We defined a naming convention for email addresses that presented a more professional view of the company. It also allowed the charity workers to be individuals and run their own projects.
If you make a system so simple that anyone can use it, they usually do. Now the charity regularly updates their web site with calender events, does mail shots and is actively updating it's Facebook page. The online activity has gone from strength to strength and their web site is now the hub of communication for charity workers and clients a like. BigSoft Limited remains on standby for when they need advice but to all intensive purposes the charity is now self sufficient.