Max spam at max rate.
I know I’m a bit late to the party, just wanted to see if anybody else thought it too.
There’s not too much on the website about the greens side of stuff. I know it’s not the main focus of the organisation, but the thing that bought me and a lot of others to the air cadets over the other cadet organisations was the fact we did all the greens stuff + flying.
(I do really like the rest of the revamp though)
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Totally agree, maybe you could provide some feedback as we should showcase everything we offer.
Weirdest thing for me about the new site is this page doesn’t mention SNCO or Commissioned roles as volunteer types and this an area where we have a gap:
Makes perfect sense as the people coming through the door will be coming in as CIs so the distinction between uniform roles is irrelevant at that early stage. Get them in as volunteer & then get them into uniform.
But they don’t need to and this “get them in as CI’s” attitude is part of the problem.
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Yeah, updated ACP 20 makes quite clear direct SNCO is perfectly okay! Just no direct commission unless you meet certain criteria, like previous commission in another service.
I disagree, show all the options. It gives people joining the organisation a better insight into who we are and what is on offer i.e. Uniform, CI, Padre etc.
The website is the marketing tool to showcase what is on offer not just a section of it.
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You have to tell them what’s on offer! By all l means say “start as a CI if you want”, but to not even say there are other options is pure negligence.
On a slightly different note, but still related to websites. I have been informed by my OC that Squadrons have been told to get rid of their websites by HQ. I’ve not seen anything official so hoping someone here might be able to clarify.
@Wizzle could probably confirm.
There has been a lot of calls to get rid of web sites over the years to move focus to the RAFAC one. Most unit pages are out of date or fail to meet accessibility guidelines.
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Every 5 years or so, often when a new top Comms person comes in, there’s a. Attempt at purging the websites.
However as there is no real control & no way able to stop people all you can do is deal with reputation risk websites as you are relying on people to comply.
However the ATC volunteers in general are a lot more rebellious these days so it would just be a full headache for those at HQ.
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I can guess what is driving this.
Some websites are very good, but most will be ancient and unmaintained. Some enterprising “security researcher” will find vulnerabilities in 123 Sqns outdated wordpress site and pester the RAF for a bug bounty or threaten to expose it publicly.
PITA for the PR and security teams at High Wycombe so a diktat comes out to mag to grid all websites to remove the risk
Indeed. There’s been no talk of this, so nothing is driving it and it’s just people putting 2 and 2 together to start a rumour that would make a good meme.
I will say that when we looked at the new RAFAC website, we did have in mind that in the future we could approach it the same way as the ACF, with local pages for Wings / Units / CCF similar to the RAF Station pages on the main RAF site. This is not something on the current roadmap, just a consideration when we were scoping the site.
That way we can give units something that’s on brand and has better search ranking, while keeping it individual to them (say locally tagged news).
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I think this would be a good option. I hate trying to keep our website up to date and if HQAC could run this centrally, I would be fully behind it.
Once less headache to worry about.
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but what would that look like if done centrally?
all 900 Squadrons would have the same content
Hi we’re 123 Squadron and meet at Douglas Bader Hall, Hill View, Anytown on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1900 until 2130.
after that it becomes “personal” such as the staff on unit and specific events/news stories a unit can report about - HQAC are not going to do that as it is best managed locally so it should only remove how it is done rather than who is doing it.
the “quote” above is unlikely to change (and probably hasn’t for 50 years) so any “updates” HQAC won’t know about
The staff in unit is an easy one.
All staff (should) add a picture to their volunteer portal and this added to the website. If they are OC, Adj etc this pops up in the description along with rank easy peasy.
I do agree that other personal content could not be managed by Corps but for me personally and my unit, Social Media is where my main content goes and we have more hits there then on the website. I dont think having a central website would make any different to the target audience but it would save so much time for the volunteer and would at the very least ensure a uniformed approach to each website.
The Corps website isn’t linked in with the rest of the Bader suite so this isn’t possible.
This is why we’ve got stupid encrypted PDF’s for new recruit information, when we should have just put a MS Form and used Power Automate to handle the personal details within Bader from the get go.
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That’s way beyond the capabilities of HQ.
Out of curiosity do we need photo consent from adult staff?
We cover this with cadets but it’s almost auto assumed that adults agree as well.
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