© 2019 Emilio Coppola
© 2019 The Urantia Book Fellowship
The “ad-hoc” (*) IT Committee is comprised of diverse members (see members listed below) to help guide and advise the EC with the overall organizational IT needs. The purpose of this Committee is to guide and implement “Technology” solutions for The Urantia Book Fellowship. There has been a second “ad-hoc” Committee (Chaired by Dana Bredemeyer) to address “Content” as well as overall look and feel - functionality-- of the website(s).
(*) Please Note: In late 2018 the EC unanimously voted to sunset the IT “AdHoc” Committee and the “Ad-Hoc” Content Committee so that they could be directly involved in the FEF Website Overhaul noted below. They also decided to move forward on the WildApricot.com platform.
The major accomplishment during this period was the decision to move forward with the EC directly managing the complete overhaul of the FEF Website currently on the Adobe Business Catalyst to the platform WildApricot. Emilio Coppola will be the EC Liaison for the project and will interface with the IT Team and the EC.
WildApricot will be our new system wide platform (www.WildApricot.com) as it will be our website hosting and content management system, allowing: the added functionality of integrated event management and registrations; a website storefront; donation management; email and newsletter distribution and tracking; online polling/voting; user-driven social media and discussion groups; and much more, all directly within the WildApricot.com software platform.
We retain Ebway Creative as a consultant on an “as needed” basis; thusly we have substantially cut our 2019 IT budget by approximately a year. In the first six months we have spent less than with this change.
A huge boost to The Urantia Book Fellowship’s ability to spread the “Good News” to the world was obtaining from Google a $40,000 a month grant for Google AdWords, with the help of Ebway Creative and Paula Thompson. Google AdWords has been difficult to manage as they have been changing the rules and we have been shut down many, many times in 2018 and sometimes for weeks at a time.
This experience seems to be universal among those organizations that have been receiving this Google AdWords Grant. As a result of this, we have decided to take some time in 2019 to re-evaluate the program and save the $6,000 a year in consulting fees for 2019. Consequently, Barry Clark has volunteered in the past month or so to help FEF with reinvigorating the program and has recently made improvements to the existing system to allow us to once again advertise to the world The Urantia Book Revelation.
Current Members of The Urantia Book Fellowship “ad-hoc” IT Committee: Disbanded, see note at beginning of report. Richard Daunt, an Independent IT Consultant, has been hired to spearhead the WildApricot (WA) Migration Project. Richard is working with a team of professional paid contractors and dedicated volunteers to bring about a radical change in The Urantia Book Fellowship’s website and to migrate FEF to a new website and system platform. The WA Migration project is more than 60% complete. The forecasted expense for the entire migration project should be under $70,000 and will take about eight months to complete. To date, we have expensed about $26,000 for the project. (Please note that the above figures do not account for the hundreds of “professional” service-level hours that have been put in by loyal and dedicated Urantia Book students. We owe them all a debt of gratitude for their service to the revelation-you will truly be amazed at what these volunteers are doing.)
It is my desire that as the EC Liaison I will continue to lead the newly constructed IT WildApricot (WA) Migration Team of Consultants in moving forward in implementing group wisdom on the organization’s needs with website solutions that are scalable and sustainable. We should be completed with the Migration by the end of August 2019. The “switchover” is going to be about a month later than was previously noted in my February 2019 GC Report. As you might imagine a lot of additional work has been added into the scope, like a wonderful new “Read The Urantia Book” feature that is sure to be a destination for website visitors and a tremendous resource for Urantia Book students everywhere.