My seven-year-old daughter asked me a question the other day that I struggled to answer as she took care of her online pets at webkinz.com. With a very concerned look, she said, “Dad, what was it like before the internet?” Though I was relieved that she wasn’t asking to start a Facebook account, I had to sit and think for a minute to come up with an answer that was accurate yet comprehendible. This question gave me the opportunity to have a teachable moment as a parent. I looked at her and said:
“Honey, there was no life before the internet.” Interview over and no more questions.
I will not pretend to be a technology wizard and admittedly do not have a Facebook, MySpace, WebShots or Webkinz account. However, I understand the power of the internet and the many benefits it can serve an organization. Since I arrived two years ago, we have made our website a priority for conveying information and that persistence has paid dividends, as we totaled more than 30,000 unique hits per month December 2007 through March 2008. Two of those months registered more than 35,000 unique hits.
With that knowledge in hand, I strongly encourage all of you to visit the new athletic development and Purple and White pages of the site. We have revamped all aspects of the area to provide you with better information, easier browsing and the ability to give online. In an effort to serve our site visitors better, we surveyed alumni and donors as to what types of information they wanted available.
Our goal is to make this area of our website as interactive as possible. Alumni will have the ability to update their contact information online so they do not miss out on important email blasts and special mailings not available to the general public. As the site grows, we will unveil new aspects of it to connect with our loyal donors and reconnect with alumni who have drifted away from Niagara University Athletics.
We are posting information on upcoming events, like the Long Island Golf Outing on September 30 or our Fall Alumni Outing on October 11-13, as well as posting photos from the event in photo galleries. You can register for those events through our website for the first time, either by clicking on the icon or clicking on the link. For those of you who are still in the courtship phase of the internet and not completely married to it yet, we will continue our regular mailings and phone outreach to our donors.
The other new feature from this redesign is a section on the university’s capital campaign, “The Promise of Niagara: The Next 150 Years.” We will display our campaign initiatives and update our alumni and donors on the progress toward those initiatives.
One capital project moving along nicely is the new synthetic outdoor field for our soccer and lacrosse teams. The playing surface has been completed, thanks in large part to the installation efforts of Unique Concepts from Calhoun, Ga., the installation sub-contractors who did an outstanding job for us. Once the bleachers, scoreboard and press box are installed this month, we will have a facility that will attract potential student-athletes and make our alumni proud.
As I wrote this column, I tried to remember what life was like before PDAs, email messages, text messages and instant messages, back when the way you solved a problem wasn’t by emailing a person and copying half of the free world but by picking up the phone or walking across campus. But our new athletic development site has opened up a whole new way for us to communicate with alumni and donors that was impossible before the internet, if that time even existed at all.
