2008 Communications Report

By Eric Yaillen, Director of Marketing & Communications

Looking back for this year in review, new plans were initiated and several significant changes were made in efforts to transition our organization for future success. 

Paramount in these plans was a renewed focus on improving the tangible benefits we provide the individual golfers that join OGA Member Clubs, establishing partnerships that help us extend the benefits and services we offer to our members and the golf community, as well as explore new opportunities to promote golf in Oregon and support area courses.  Examples of past partnerships that we hope to expand upon include our endorsement and support for the Portland Golf Show and the publication Golfing Oregon, an annual directory promoting Oregon’s unique and diverse golf portfolio.

Each day, more and more people utilize the internet for quick and easy access to information. In fact, we’ve seen the number of visitors to our websites increase exponentially over the years.  That’s why we continue to focus more attention to this medium.  With nearly 1 million more hits than the previous year, our primary website www.oga.org saw total hits top the 12 million mark for the first time.  Other important metrics also showed significant increases including the average number of unique visitors each month (+16%), total pageviews (+12%), and average length of visit (+45%).  

After the first complete year in existence, ExploreOregonGolf.com has proven itself to be one of the top directories for golf on the internet with more than 22,000 visits and 188,000 pageviews. ExploreOregonGolf is the only directory of its kind in that it includes information about the golf courses people can play, the OGA Member Clubs they can join and the events (open to the public) that they can play in.  This FREE service also provides golf course information to TravelOregon and is the chosen resource for several other major, high traffic sites.  It is provided to all golf courses in the region, typically saving golf courses more than $1,500/year – the cost of listings on comparable sites. We continue to encourage OGA Member Clubs, Golf Course owners and golf professionals call the OGA to obtain a username and password so that they can update their listings and ensure their information is complete, accurate and up-to-date. 

By the end of the year, we began work on redesigning the OGA website www.oga.org.  Visitors have access from the latest golf news from the OGA as well as local papers such as the Bend Bulletin, Eugene Register Guard and the Oregonian.  You'll also find newsfeeds from Golf Digest, Sports Illustrated, Fox Sports, Golf Week and LPGA.com

We’ll also provide visitors an insider's look at what's going on in the region through several OGA blogs including:

Outside Agency: the OGA Rules of Golf blog; Preferred Lies: the OGA Handicapping blog; Transition Zone:  the OGA Course Rating blog; Inside the Ropes: the OGA Championship blog, and; the FUNdamentals: the OGA Junior Golf blog
     
All of our blogs support RSS (Real Simple Syndication) so you can subscribe and see the latest posts whenever they occur.  Additionally, we’re starting to add webinar content and forums so that we can build our online community and resources.

Elevating the stature of our major championships, we decided to create more in-depth sites for several of our notable events.  The greatest effort was made with both the Oregon Amateur and Oregon Junior Amateur with complete video recaps of the event posted on their respective sites and on YouTube.   We also continue to add lots of event photos as we now have more than 4,000 photos that have been viewed by more than 28,000 visitors on FLICKR.com.  The photos have been integral to our strategy of helping the media report on our players and our events.  Event photos are regularly published by several of the regions top daily papers, weekly/community papers and area magazines.  Some of our photos have also been published by the major golf publications including Golfweek.

Finally, we continued to promote eClubhouse™ -- a FREE website integrated with both GHIN® and TPP® that helps OGA Member clubs communicate more detailed information and hopefully grow their membership.  

Please take the time to review both eClubhouse™ and ExploreOregonGolf.com™ and make sure your clubs is taking advantage of these FREE services.

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