The Mountaineers: A Member-Driven Website
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Bowman, Jeff
Mitchell, Alec
Jeff Bowman, Alec Mitchell and Sally Kleinfeldt discuss The Mountaineers' feature-rich outdoor education Plone site
 Hello and welcome to our world blown day session. I'm Sally Kleinfeld from just Carter a US based company specializing in open source web web technologies especially blown and with me is is a Jeff Bowman he is the IT manager of the Mountaineers and Alec Mitchell one of our developers here at just Carter also a former Plone Release Manager you might remember him from that. So just Carter has been working with the Mountaineers on their blown site since 2013 and we're going to share a bit of that history with you. So with that I'll maybe turn it over to you Jeff for a bit about the Mountaineers history and let me know when you want me to dive into a little tour of your site. Sure thanks Alec. Hi Alec. Alright so where the Mountaineers is a is a nonprofit based in Seattle Washington we're volunteer driven and our mission is helping people explore, conserve, learn about, enjoy the lands and waters of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. We've been around since 1906 so well past a hundred years now. Well established organization. We teach people how to recreate safely. We have lots of activities going that are all run by volunteers so that's that's basically who we are. How we got here was having a website that just partly having several websites out there all of our committees and branches wanting to have their own space and claiming to be the Mountaineers and people being confused about who we were so we knew we had to kind of get down to one website and one that worked well for everybody so that's that's how we how we got where we are. We started like Sally said in 2013 probably a couple years before that figuring out what we wanted and engaging people to help us get there. We started the Project Ernest in 2013 launched on May 5th 2014 have made several feature additions and improvements to our website over the years and recently have partnered with the Colorado Mountain Club. It's a very similar organization based in I guess Golden Colorado Boulder Colorado Denver so they're all over Colorado. I'm not sure where their home base is but but they're certainly Colorado and they're just like us they want they loved our website. They asked if they could basically buy it from us so we now have a partnership where they're we're gonna be sharing a code base and having two websites that work the same but look a little different because we are different and have a few minor differences so that's that's where we are over the past seven eight years and we love what we have and we love what what the jazz card has done for us so go ahead Sally. Alright well let's let's take a look at the site so you want to give us a tour and tell me where to go Jeff. Sure yeah this is our home page and as I said we're a nonprofit so we have our big gala this week which is why we've got that image up here in the home page we've got our blog which is one of the we wanted a center center well there that's we wanted a place where where people could learn about us in a nice way easy to add info we've also got some information about the trip reports and activities you can see those two big green boxes there help people get to find what they want to do quickly so let's go ahead and go in in activities go to find activities you can you can do that that's perfect and while you're talking about this why don't you give us a little bit of insight into how the members or your volunteers factor into the content on this website because I know this website would just not exist or not for literally hundreds of Mountaineers volunteers that create content actually actually we have probably depending on how you count it up to upwards of 3,000 volunteers and in some way many of our members are volunteers too and in doing store chip trail maintenance type projects but yeah our in in terms of adding content of website our volunteers do the vast majority of that they add their activities which include a beautiful image titles descriptions of what they're doing dates are doing it this is a this is you know in clone terms is a faceted search so this is an easy way for a member to drill down to what they want to do or volunteers have a similar menu we did we call them routes in places where they can pick where they want to go and once they've done that you know once they've picked from list looking it looks a lot like this they get to add their activity tell them you know when we're doing it what their committee is all the details about that particular activity and then people can sign up for it so they we also have we have the start and end dates of activities we also have a registration period so they can define when people can actually register and then of course all kinds of you know details about the activity and where they're going map we use map box for our for a couple of map points people can kind of see where the start and end might be we also have we also sell books so if there are books or also a green shells maps is one of our partnerships people can see what books might go with that in terms of a guidebook or if it's a course what book might be helpful in in their book that might have required reading or recommended reading for their course and as part of the when they sign up they'll they can actually add it to their cart so they can have one transaction where they're signing up and paying for everything let's see so I do what do you want to do we want to try to sign up for an activity or just go on let's just go over you know so we so we also first we have a similar thing for courses where people can search use the fastest search to find the course they want Sally how would here if we go to course overviews sure everybody everybody say everybody knows what a fastest first looks like now yeah so we also you know we also wanted to you know one of the goals of our website was to make things you know simple people understand so we have this course overview page we also have an activity overview page where we describe what people can learn what they can do so any clicking on any one of these we call them course activity buttons people can learn more about what courses we offer what they can learn how they can improve their skills so this is a this is a nice feature where if they aren't quite sure what they want they can kind of learn more about the particular you know courses and activities who offer before they go into searching for them and signing up for stuff great I know that or at least I think I recall that after your site launch your analytics showed a pretty good effect on your SEO from from the new the new structure of the site did you remember that you want to talk at all about that yeah yes we use Google Analytics and we were I'm digging down to it I wear that where to have that I had that I had that handy and went away from it let's just do it this way okay I think we nearly doubled up there it is blue past it we nearly doubled our page views from our Google Analytics from our old website to our new website shortly after launch and that's we've also grown our membership we were probably I think about 9,000 members and today we have nearly 13,000 members so we've grown out to the website you know it's helped us grow our membership we've nearly double did double more than double I think probably to this to this part of me for you know since our old website we're probably more than double on our page views at this point but as of shortly after a couple months after launch we were 70% more so yeah it's it's been it's been a big boon to us more people can more people can find us more people better understand what who we are and what we do looks like Sally's looking at a branch page we just illustrate what you were saying about the fact that your branches wanted to have a presence so we essentially develop little subsites for them yep so each each brand a nice thing about these pages is the branches once these were built don't have to do anything all of the content on these pages I mean they could certainly change their the picture if they want to or their little that little note of summary tell if you could scroll down the page a little bit oh sure so that that latest branch news on the on the left and those other portlets on the right with events those are automatically populated so they don't branches don't have to do anything to keep up to date all they have to do are add blogs specific to their branch add events and then those up those two top ones will take them to their buttons to learn about their how they do courses and activities at their particular branch so that's things of course that gives their about pages a nice overview of the branch and how to get more involved with it so what would you which would you which would oh Bellingham yeah bellingham is not our most active branch maybe maybe go to Seattle that's a that's a that'll be a good start contract sure let's see Seattle Seattle yeah smiling faces there every scram if we go down if we go to their courses and activities you'll see they have they have almost all the course and activity buttons there so they saw our Seattle branch that's our biggest branch more probably half our membership are better and they offered just about every type of activity and of course in that activity that we that we have to offer cool one of the unusual things about this site is how tightly integrated it is with salesforce.com which is the your CRM the constituent relationship management system that you use you want to talk a little bit about how that works and and how much that has factored into sort of the success of your of your website you think sure yeah so we nearly every transaction on our website is synced with salesforce so all of our contacts every time they buy something courses activities donations they make are synced to salesforce so we have all that data that we can use for engagement statistics for engagement with people we also especially with the donations our development team has all that information there and they can make grand use of how people interact with us to reach out for donations and all our fundraising efforts we also use it to connect with our email marketing system so that's that's how we actually send out all of our newsletters what else we got we got probably three or four newsletters a month each of our branches we can use that to help them send a newsletter for their branch and our we also use it for reporting mostly for staff but lately we've been integrating our Salesforce data with Google we have there's a connector that allows us to get but we just lost your audio Jeff maybe while Jeff is getting back his audio Alec you want to say a few words about how the how the Salesforce to clone integration works well we've got you back there we go we got you back I need to turn my phone disconnect my phone and my speakerphone okay I was saying or did you hear me we heard most of it I was just asking Alec to say a little bit about kind of the technical technical stuff behind the Salesforce clone connection yeah it's you know it's it's all pretty bespoke I don't think we use any specific kind of clone add-ons for the Salesforce integration we use the simple Salesforce Python clients and then almost all of the Salesforce API calls are done by a asynchronous tasks in a salary task queue so whenever some sort of operation happens through the web whether that is creating a new man adding a new member making a purchase on the site or even creating some content on the site depending on the type of content we create a an asynchronous task in salary that will run you know in its own in its own process that gets triggered once the transaction is committed so that way we don't have to worry too much about transaction synchronization or delaying web responses in order to wait for Salesforce API calls which can be quite slow and expensive and we do a lot of them and then we also have some kind of periodic tasks that run once a day or once an hour that do sort of maintenance and kind of synchronization back and forth between Salesforce and clone so that's that's the basics of it want to say just a little bit about what data is is synced back and forth either either Jeff or or Alec Jeff can probably answer that he spends the time in Salesforce and I think that there's a lot of stuff might be was easy to say what we don't sync from one we you know we we from clone to Salesforce it's base it basically it pushes every time we do something it tries to send it to Salesforce right away and it's everything I would say except our blogs and pages things that are just content only anytime it involves a person signing up something you're adding an activity or a new route place or a new course that all gets all that data gets into Salesforce the benefit that your volunteers who are creating your courses and activities create all this content and then it automatically gets synced to Salesforce which of course they don't have access to Salesforce but they don't need to because they've created the content on a website all on the website we do I think our contacts four times a day we sink back to Salesforce so if our development team has got an update from one of their donors that on our contact info that'll get synced back to Salesforce and we've got a few lists that we use on the website that we can manually sync from Salesforce back to clone a few a few a few picklists and and from a technical standpoint because because Mountaineers is a non-profit organization they can take advantage of Salesforce's non-profit licensing but there are some pretty strict kind of per seat number of seat limits that you have for the number of users that can have access as well as limits on the number of API calls you can make and and so in order to to ensure we can use that non-profit edition without incurring extra charges or doing things like that you know we can we can set up a system where all of these thousands of members have sort of access and profiles and their up their their activity on the site ends up syncing to Salesforce but they don't need Salesforce accounts which is often the traditional way these sort of things work where people are using Salesforce portals which can get very very expensive and have performance issues as well and then on top of that we do these kind of batch synchronizations for certain types of operations so that we can synchronize many many records all at once on a nightly basis or something in a single transaction or a few small transactions rather than doing it throughout the day or in thousands of transactions so so those sorts of optimizations really help with with costs and efficiency yep Jeff you want to say a word just a rough give us a rough idea how many members the mountaineers has how many people are sort of active as logged in members of the plones of the website on a sort of daily basis that that I don't know but we have nearly 13,000 members and 3,000 kind of active volunteers who would be creating content yeah on a daily basis it's hard to say how many there'd be I don't even yeah I could probably I might go to figure that out from Salesforce Alec is there an easy clone thing I'm just curious if you have an idea of sort of daily sign-ups and stuff like that for for all your courses and activities this has been an outlier year of course with not so many in-person activities we made a pretty good switch doing a lot of our stuff online with you know zoom meetings and events and whatnot so and people you know people really do want to get outside so we have been able to do that in our usual small if anything it's helping drive us to be smaller groups outside which is something we desire so anything the pandemic pandemic has kind of helped us with with that also puts nicks on carpooling but otherwise you right yeah we do a lot with that carpooling let's go ahead to do some hiking and climbing let's see what else anything to you want to cover about books or any other parts of the site that we didn't really delve into that you especially want to want to mention either of you actually Alec if there's anything of particular interest I don't know I will the other thing I'll talk the other unique feature of our website that brings us together are the badges yeah yeah I thought that was we know we have all though we have we so we have this thing called badges and you know back in before the on our old website you could imagine if we use badges as prerequisite to register for an activity like you have to have a climbing badge to sign up for a climb we basically in our old website had seven of them one for each branch that offered the course now we have one so you take a course you graduate you get the one badge we offer it's the one badge required for sign up so it kind of has helped us standardize our curriculum across the board and makes it easier to know that if you anybody's qualified can go on any hiking matter what the branches they've got the same level of training we've got the same set of standards so we're not a hundred percent there yet but it's certainly one of the one of the other big features of our new website that's helped us quite a bit few I finally found a badge yep yep and and each of the courses have I found a badge but I didn't actually show it there we go there's a badge each of our each of the courses I got to this by my virtue of coming from this wilderness first aid course and the courses will have rosters of people who sign up for the course in each activity that forms a part of the course will have its own rosters and thus the website tracks and thus Salesforce Salesforce also is tracking what all the members of the of the these courses and activities are doing and the instructors verify that they've completed the things that they need to complete for the badges let's see what else anything anything about the anything about the e-commerce side of things yeah so I guess I got two things kind of mind with with e-commerce one of things we wanted was one shopping cart so people can sign up for a course put that in your shopping cart if they want if they're joining they can have their membership in the cart and if they got books to go with the course they can add those so basically they can add everything to a cart check out in one transaction one credit card transaction so that makes it a lot easier old site didn't quite have all that together they can even make a donation when they're in the cart so that was another another good feature our website right right yeah that was real important I remember to be able to combine any mix and match we also implemented some promo codes and discounts that people can get and apply to different yeah it's important though the one thing we didn't do is being able to sell event tickets which we use event right for which connects sort of with Salesforce but with our CMC project that's one of the things on a dock is to actually be able to sell tickets on both of our website so that's a that'll kind of complete the the cycle of any anybody can buy anything from website and it goes in one cart so right right the the payment processor for the Mountaineer website is Stripe when we adopted Stripe pretty much in the early days of Stripe I remember David Glick being very excited about discovering Stripe and what a what a nice developer experience it was to integrate it and and it kind of inspired us in the future at Jezcarra to kind of peel off some of the functionality that we had developed in Mountaineers and put it into an add-on called Jezcarra to Shop which implements that idea of a shopping cart with integration with Stripe or other payment processors so anyway you were very inspiring and the Mountaineers has always been quite generous in in allowing us to open source you know appropriate things that we that we create for them so that's a nice a nice we definitely like Stripe that's been that's been a good bit of solid processor for us so yeah no complaints there that's all right well I think we can maybe wrap up it was really great to get a little tour Jeff thank you so much for your insights and Alec and yeah everybody head on over to Mountaineers.org and check out all their amazing courses and content if you're anywhere in the Pacific Northwest it's good if you're not buy a book we got lots of good books that's right that's right your area we got them for the whole the whole world a lot of good biographies and narratives and lots of good read too. Excellent all right thanks everybody thank you bye bye.
 Hello and welcome to our world blown day session. I'm Sally Kleinfeld from just  Carter a US based company specializing in open source web web technologies  especially blown and with me is is a Jeff Bowman he is the IT manager of the  Mountaineers and Alec Mitchell one of our developers here at just Carter also a  former Plone Release Manager you might remember him from that. So just Carter  has been working with the Mountaineers on their blown site since 2013 and we're  going to share a bit of that history with you. So with that I'll maybe turn it  over to you Jeff for a bit about the Mountaineers history and let me know when  you want me to dive into a little tour of your site. Sure thanks Alec. Hi Alec.  Alright so where the Mountaineers is a is a nonprofit based in Seattle Washington  we're volunteer driven and our mission is helping people explore, conserve, learn  about, enjoy the lands and waters of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. We've been  around since 1906 so well past a hundred years now. Well established  organization. We teach people how to recreate safely. We have lots of  activities going that are all run by volunteers so that's that's basically  who we are. How we got here was having a website that just partly having several  websites out there all of our committees and branches wanting to have their own  space and claiming to be the Mountaineers and people being confused about  who we were so we knew we had to kind of get down to one website and one that  worked well for everybody so that's that's how we how we got where we are.  We started like Sally said in 2013 probably a couple years before that  figuring out what we wanted and engaging people to help us get there. We started  the Project Ernest in 2013 launched on May 5th 2014 have made several feature  additions and improvements to our website over the years and recently  have partnered with the Colorado Mountain Club. It's a very similar  organization based in I guess Golden Colorado Boulder Colorado Denver so  they're all over Colorado. I'm not sure where their home base is but but they're  certainly Colorado and they're just like us they want they loved our  website. They asked if they could basically buy it from us so we now have a  partnership where they're we're gonna be sharing a code base and having two  websites that work the same but look a little different because we are  different and have a few minor differences so that's that's where we are  over the past seven eight years and we love what we have and we love what  what the jazz card has done for us so go ahead Sally. Alright well let's let's  take a look at the site so you want to give us a tour and tell me where to go  Jeff. Sure yeah this is our home page and as I said we're a nonprofit so we  have our big gala this week which is why we've got that image up here in the  home page we've got our blog which is one of the we wanted a center center well  there that's we wanted a place where where people could learn about us in a  nice way easy to add info we've also got some information about the trip reports  and activities you can see those two big green boxes there help people get to  find what they want to do quickly so let's go ahead and go in in activities  go to find activities you can you can do that that's perfect and while you're  talking about this why don't you give us a little bit of insight into how the  members or your volunteers factor into the content on this website because I  know this website would just not exist or not for literally hundreds of  Mountaineers volunteers that create content actually actually we have  probably depending on how you count it up to upwards of 3,000 volunteers and in  some way many of our members are volunteers too and in doing store  chip trail maintenance type projects but yeah our in in terms of adding content  of website our volunteers do the vast majority of that they add their  activities which include a beautiful image titles descriptions of what they're  doing dates are doing it this is a this is you know in clone terms is a  faceted search so this is an easy way for a member to drill down to what they  want to do or volunteers have a similar menu we did we call them routes in  places where they can pick where they want to go and once they've done that  you know once they've picked from list looking it looks a lot like this they  get to add their activity tell them you know when we're doing it what their  committee is all the details about that particular activity and then people can  sign up for it so they we also have we have the start and end dates of  activities we also have a registration period so they can define when people can  actually register and then of course all kinds of you know details about the  activity and where they're going map we use map box for our for a couple of  map points people can kind of see where the start and end might be we also have  we also sell books so if there are books or also a green shells maps is one of  our partnerships people can see what books might go with that in terms of a  guidebook or if it's a course what book might be helpful in in their book that  might have required reading or recommended reading for their course and  as part of the when they sign up they'll they can actually add it to their cart  so they can have one transaction where they're signing up and paying for  everything let's see so I do what do you want to do we want to try to sign up for  an activity or just go on let's just go over  you know so we so we also first we have a similar thing for courses where people  can search use the fastest search to find the course they want Sally how would  here if we go to course overviews sure everybody everybody say everybody knows  what a fastest first looks like now yeah so we also you know we also wanted to you  know one of the goals of our website was to make things you know simple people  understand so we have this course overview page we also have an activity  overview page where we describe what people can learn what they can do so any  clicking on any one of these we call them course activity buttons people can  learn more about what courses we offer what they can learn how they can improve  their skills so this is a this is a nice feature where if they aren't quite sure  what they want they can kind of learn more about the particular you know courses  and activities who offer before they go into searching for them and signing up  for stuff great I know that or at least I think I recall that after your site  launch your analytics showed a pretty good effect on your SEO from from the  new the new structure of the site did you remember that you want to talk at all  about that yeah yes we use Google Analytics and we were I'm digging down  to it I wear that where to have that I had that I had that handy and went away  from it let's just do it this way okay I think we nearly doubled up there it is  blue past it we nearly doubled our page views from our Google Analytics from our  old website to our new website shortly after launch and that's we've also grown  our membership we were probably I think about 9,000 members and today we have  nearly 13,000 members so we've grown out to the website you know it's helped us  grow our membership we've nearly double did double more than double I think  probably to this to this part of me for you know since our old website we're  probably more than double on our page views at this point but as of shortly  after a couple months after launch we were 70% more so yeah it's it's been it's  been a big boon to us more people can more people can find us more people  better understand what who we are and what we do looks like Sally's looking at  a branch page we just illustrate what you were saying about the fact that your  branches wanted to have a presence so we essentially develop little subsites for  them yep so each each brand a nice thing about these pages is the branches  once these were built don't have to do anything all of the content on these  pages I mean they could certainly change their the picture if they want to or  their little that little note of summary tell if you could scroll down the page  a little bit oh sure so that that latest branch news on the on the left and  those other portlets on the right with events those are automatically populated  so they don't branches don't have to do anything to keep up to date all they  have to do are add blogs specific to their branch add events and then those  up those two top ones will take them to their buttons to learn about their how  they do courses and activities at their particular branch so that's things of  course that gives their about pages a nice overview of the branch and how to  get more involved with it so what would you which would you which would oh  Bellingham yeah bellingham is not our most active branch maybe maybe go to  Seattle that's a that's a that'll be a good start contract sure let's see Seattle  Seattle yeah smiling faces there every scram if we go down if we go to their  courses and activities you'll see they have they have almost all the course  and activity buttons there so they saw our Seattle branch that's our biggest  branch more probably half our membership are better and they offered just about  every type of activity and of course in that activity that we that we have to  offer cool one of the unusual things about this site is how tightly  integrated it is with salesforce.com which is the your CRM the  constituent relationship management system that you use you want to talk a  little bit about how that works and and how much that has factored into sort of  the success of your of your website you think sure yeah so we nearly every  transaction on our website is synced with salesforce so all of our contacts  every time they buy something courses activities donations they make are  synced to salesforce so we have all that data that we can use for engagement  statistics for engagement with people we also especially with the donations our  development team has all that information there and they can make  grand use of how people interact with us to reach out for donations and all our  fundraising efforts we also use it to connect with our email marketing system  so that's that's how we actually send out all of our newsletters what else we  got we got probably three or four newsletters a month each of our branches  we can use that to help them send a newsletter for their branch and our we  also use it for reporting mostly for staff but lately we've been integrating  our Salesforce data with Google we have there's a connector that allows us to get  but we just lost your audio Jeff  maybe while Jeff is getting back his audio Alec you want to say a few words  about how the how the Salesforce to clone integration works  well we've got you back there we go we got you back I need to turn my phone  disconnect my phone and my speakerphone okay I was saying or did you hear me we  heard most of it I was just asking Alec to say a little bit about kind of the  technical technical stuff behind the Salesforce clone connection yeah it's  you know it's it's all pretty bespoke I don't think we use any specific kind of  clone add-ons for the Salesforce integration we use the simple Salesforce  Python clients and then almost all of the Salesforce API calls are done by a  asynchronous tasks in a salary task queue so whenever some sort of operation  happens through the web whether that is creating a new man adding a new member  making a purchase on the site or even creating some content on the site  depending on the type of content we create a an asynchronous task in  salary that will run you know in its own in its own process that gets triggered  once the transaction is committed so that way we don't have to worry too much  about transaction synchronization or delaying web responses in order to wait  for Salesforce API calls which can be quite slow and expensive and we do a lot  of them and then we also have some kind of periodic tasks that run once a day or  once an hour that do sort of maintenance and kind of synchronization back and  forth between Salesforce and clone so that's that's the basics of it want to  say just a little bit about what data is is synced back and forth either either  Jeff or or Alec Jeff can probably answer that he spends the time in Salesforce and  I think that there's a lot of stuff might be was easy to say what we don't  sync from one we you know we we from clone to Salesforce it's base it  basically it pushes every time we do something it tries to send it to  Salesforce right away and it's everything I would say except our blogs and pages  things that are just content only anytime it involves a person signing up  something you're adding an activity or a new route place or a new course that all  gets all that data gets into Salesforce the benefit that your volunteers who  are creating your courses and activities create all this content and then it  automatically gets synced to Salesforce which of course they don't have access to  Salesforce but they don't need to because they've created the content on a  website all on the website we do I think our contacts four times a day we sink  back to Salesforce so if our development team has got an update from one of their  donors that on our contact info that'll get synced back to Salesforce and we've  got a few lists that we use on the website that we can manually sync from  Salesforce back to clone a few a few a few picklists and and from a technical  standpoint because because Mountaineers is a non-profit organization they can  take advantage of Salesforce's non-profit licensing but there are some  pretty strict kind of per seat number of seat limits that you have for the number  of users that can have access as well as limits on the number of API calls you  can make and and so in order to to ensure we can use that non-profit edition  without incurring extra charges or doing things like that you know we can we can  set up a system where all of these thousands of members have sort of  access and profiles and their up their their activity on the site ends up  syncing to Salesforce but they don't need Salesforce accounts which is often  the traditional way these sort of things work where people are using Salesforce  portals which can get very very expensive and have performance issues as  well and then on top of that we do these kind of batch synchronizations for  certain types of operations so that we can synchronize many many records all  at once on a nightly basis or something in a single transaction or a few small  transactions rather than doing it throughout the day or in thousands of  transactions so so those sorts of optimizations really help with with costs  and efficiency yep Jeff you want to say a word just a rough give us a rough idea  how many members the mountaineers has how many people are sort of active as  logged in members of the plones of the website on a sort of daily basis that  that I don't know but we have nearly 13,000 members and 3,000 kind of active  volunteers who would be creating content yeah on a daily basis it's hard to say  how many there'd be I don't even yeah I could probably I might go to figure that  out from Salesforce Alec is there an easy clone thing  I'm just curious if you have an idea of sort of daily sign-ups and stuff like that for for all your courses and activities this has been an outlier year of course  with not so many in-person activities we made a pretty good switch doing a lot of our  stuff online with you know zoom meetings and events and whatnot so and people  you know people really do want to get outside so we have been able to do that  in our usual small if anything it's helping drive us to be smaller groups  outside which is something we desire so anything the pandemic pandemic has kind  of helped us with with that also puts nicks on carpooling but otherwise you  right yeah we do a lot with that carpooling  let's go ahead to do some hiking and climbing  let's see what else anything to you want to cover about books or any other parts  of the site that we didn't really delve into that you especially want to want  to mention either of you actually Alec if there's anything of particular interest  I don't know I will the other thing I'll talk the other unique feature of our  website that brings us together are the badges yeah yeah I thought that was we  know we have all though we have we so we have this thing called badges and you  know back in before the on our old website you could imagine if we use  badges as prerequisite to register for an activity like you have to have a  climbing badge to sign up for a climb we basically in our old website had seven  of them one for each branch that offered the course now we have one so you take a  course you graduate you get the one badge we offer it's the one badge required  for sign up so it kind of has helped us standardize our curriculum across the  board and makes it easier to know that if you anybody's qualified can go on any  hiking matter what the branches they've got the same level of training we've got  the same set of standards so we're not a hundred percent there yet but it's  certainly one of the one of the other big features of our new website that's  helped us quite a bit few I finally found a badge yep yep and and each of the  courses have I found a badge but I didn't actually show it there we go  there's a badge each of our each of the courses I got to this by my virtue of  coming from this wilderness first aid course and the courses will have  rosters of people who sign up for the course in each activity that forms a  part of the course will have its own rosters and thus the website tracks and  thus Salesforce Salesforce also is tracking what all the members of the  of the these courses and activities are doing and the instructors verify that  they've completed the things that they need to complete for the badges let's  see what else anything anything about the anything about the e-commerce side of  things yeah so I guess I got two things kind of mind with with e-commerce one of  things we wanted was one shopping cart so people can sign up for a course put  that in your shopping cart if they want if they're joining they can have their  membership in the cart and if they got books to go with the course they can add  those so basically they can add everything to a cart check out in one  transaction one credit card transaction so that makes it a lot easier old site  didn't quite have all that together they can even make a donation when they're in  the cart so that was another another good feature our website right right yeah  that was real important I remember to be able to combine any mix and match we  also implemented some promo codes and discounts that people can get and apply  to different yeah it's important though the one thing we didn't do is being  able to sell event tickets which we use event right for which connects sort of  with Salesforce but with our CMC project that's one of the things on a dock is to  actually be able to sell tickets on both of our website so that's a that'll  kind of complete the the cycle of any anybody can buy anything from website and  it goes in one cart so right right the the payment processor for the Mountaineer  website is Stripe when we adopted Stripe pretty much in the early days of  Stripe I remember David Glick being very excited about discovering Stripe and  what a what a nice developer experience it was to integrate it and and it kind  of inspired us in the future at Jezcarra to kind of peel off some of the  functionality that we had developed in Mountaineers and put it into an add-on  called Jezcarra to Shop which implements that idea of a shopping cart with  integration with Stripe or other payment processors so anyway you were very  inspiring and the Mountaineers has always been quite generous in in allowing  us to open source you know appropriate things that we that we create for them  so that's a nice a nice we definitely like Stripe that's been that's been a  good bit of solid processor for us so yeah no complaints there that's all right  well I think we can maybe wrap up it was really great to get a little tour Jeff  thank you so much for your insights and Alec and yeah everybody head on over to  Mountaineers.org and check out all their amazing courses and content if you're  anywhere in the Pacific Northwest it's good if you're not buy a book we got  lots of good books that's right that's right your area we got them for the  whole the whole world a lot of good biographies and narratives and lots of  good read too. Excellent all right thanks everybody thank you bye bye.
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