Good Evening David,
And another personal slight at me. Thank-you.
I would like to think that I have a very good sense of humour and a degree of resilience too. However, in relation to your personalisation of how I am personally about to waste a quarter of a million on a new website, well you couldn't be more wrong. Any leader of any organisation has to listen to those who provide advice on how specific things where they have far more knowledge on a particular topic. In addition any committee of any note would look at the long term strategic picture of an association as opposed to waiting until the last minute and then realising that the finances are not fit for purpose. Let me articulate the reasons why to you.
Our site gets almost two million visits a year, contains some 50 sub-sites (one for each local group plus the “hundreds”) and a challenge event management system (PACER) which had some 40,000 visits over the last 100 weekend alone. It also provides secure transactional capability, membership services, an online magazine, forum provision and accommodation booking facilities as well as acting as a national repository for several thousand long distance paths, 100 annual challenge events and some 2000 local group social events per year.
So there is a lot of functionality there which has taken at least 15 years to build, with a typical annual developer spend of around £10-£20k per year - i.e. some £150-£200k in total. When the time comes to rebuild our website completely - as it eventually will because the platform is bespoke and becoming costly to maintain - we don’t want to take 15 years to do it. So that 15 years of spend will be compressed into 1-2 years, hence giving us a big one off bill. That suggests a cost of around £200k for a complete rebuild. And it’s worth remembering, by way of comparison, that the Ramblers spend some £300k every year on their web and IT services.
All this would be essentially just to upgrade what we currently have, and doesn’t consider new step out functionality. If we wanted to build some form of sophisticated app, for example, all the app programmers we have spoken to tell us that this can’t be done for under £5k, and £30k may not be beyond the realms of possibility. So we need to factor this possible cost in, too.
But the bigger issue will be on deciding what exactly we want our online services to do for us, and on what content and functionality we will need to achieve those objectives. Only once we have nailed that down will we be able to commission a developer to build it. Creating this detailed specification may be something that LDWA volunteers could do - but it’s a really tough job and would all need completing in 12 months not 15 years. So we may need to buy in professional help to do this, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect this could cost as much as £50-£100k on top of the web developer fee.
We may be able to do all this a lot cheaper if we abandon large swathes of content in the new website. However, we won’t know this until we are well into the project. It is far more prudent to anticipate and start saving for a costly project now, rather than hope we can do it cheaply only to find we can’t afford it once it’s too late and the project is unstoppable. If it turns out we have over-budgeted, we will be in the fortunate position of having a surplus which can be ploughed back into the Association for alternative projects. If we start saving now, when the project is probably still 3-5 years off, our annual cash generation target will be modest and won’t place a burden on members. If we leave it all to the last minute, we may be forced to borrow to fund it, or to impose a significant and very unwelcome levy on our members.
When the time comes to rebuild the website (because it won't be me as Chair of our LDWA), and once we have got the specification nailed down, I imagine that the NEC at the time would require us to issue a tender document and invite several potential suppliers to bid for the business. In this way, we will have a much better idea of the true scope and cost of the project, and can assure our members that we are getting the best possible value for their money.
We’re always looking for help in the IT team and indeed on the NEC. There are vacancies arising next year, certainly the IT Officer role, the Publicity Officer and the Long Distance Paths rep and perhaps even the Chair. Perhaps your very useful knowledge could be used to further enhance, modernise and secure the future of the LDWA.
Regards,
David Morgan