TL;DR – We are moving content that is primarily for members and partners from the main WACD website to the WACD Hub. Contact Tom Salzer (tsalzer@wadistricts.org, 360-999-5151 x101) with your feedback.

Dear Members and Partners:

TheHub 320x284 rectThe recent survey results about the 5 Things newsletter proved interesting. The individual comments were also interesting because several presented exactly opposite desires. Specifically, one group of comments amounted to: make the newsletter shorter. Another group pretty much said: we like it long and in-depth so keep it the way it is.

In other words, keep it short and give us more. These opposite points of view pose a challenging conundrum. How do we satisfy both desires? In fact, can we satisfy both perspectives?

Yes, we can. We can make the newsletter shorter and still provide access to more content. The way we are going about that is to build a separate website to house the more detailed information that some of our members and partners want. We can then insert links to that content into the 5 Things newsletter, resulting in a shorter newsletter while simultaneously giving folks the ability to click a link to dive deeper into specific topics.

This feels like a win-win. We would not have traveled this path without your helpful feedback. Thank you for the help!

We have already started to build out the special site called the WACD Hub, or simply: the Hub. Content will be focused on information of interest and importance to members and partners. Once we finish moving member-focused content from the main website to the Hub, we’ll remove it from the main website. That will allow us to be clearer with our messaging to the general public on the main site and still provide more focused, intensive content for you.

You can check out the unfinished site at https://wadistricts.us. Our goal wasn’t to make it particularly pretty or glitzy. Instead, we’re trying to address the desire that several people expressed: lean toward a utilitarian presentation rather than lose people in fancy layout and graphics.

(If you run across protected content, use the same simple password we have previously shared in the 5 Things newsletter, or contact us.)

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Most of the content on the Hub is public. But we also have the ability to restrict some content and there are some bits and pieces that are protected. We do this to reduce the incidence of things like email harvesting. Specifically, the Excel spreadsheets we publish with regional lists of email addresses for conservation district supervisors, chairs, and managers would make it easy for spammers to harvest that content. Thus, we provide a layer of protection to help protect you.

When you see a protected part, use the same general password we’ve previously shared for the main site. If you need it, contact us.

We’re about 30 hours into this website build and there is still time to give us early feedback. It is a work in progress, only about 80% complete. As we’ve demonstrated, we’re going to listen and try to satisfy your requests, so please do share your thoughts with us.

As always, I appreciate your thoughts, so do feel free to share them with us!

Tom Salzer, Executive Director