Great Ocean Road Coast Committee Blog
News and stories from our iconic coast
The May intake of the Green Army team has graduated after completing six months of environmental conservation work on the Surf Coast.
The Federal Government funded Green Army initiative supports the hands-on environmental training and development of youths aged between 17 and 24. Read more
Today marks the start of a brave new world for GORCC with the launch of our new website and associated social media tools, including this GORCC Talk Blog.
For some time now, we’ve recognised that our existing website, which was launched in November 2005, was in need of an overhaul if we were to achieve our objective of improving the way we communicate and engage with people online.
This view was reinforced by a research project undertaken between April and June last year, which identified a strong need to redevelop the website as a resource where people can learn and discover our coastal environment, and local groups and others can share information online.
We also saw – perhaps somewhat belatedly – the multitude of exciting opportunities offered by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, FlickR and other social media tools in terms of informing, educating, connecting, interacting and engaging with people in the online environment.
Over the past few months, we’ve been exploring some of these tools and are now ready to make our first real foray into social media in conjunction with the new website.
The development of the new website has been funded from the Australian Government’s Caring for our Country program and is part of our Helping communities help the coast along the Great Ocean Road program, which aims to raise awareness of the importance of caring for the coast in the face of population growth, climate change and other threats.
As such, our new website provides an interactive and dynamic tool that enables people to learn about our organisation and its work, the issues confronting our coast and the simple things we can all do to help look after it. We want people to enjoy the coast but to also respect and care for it.
Our new Facebook and Twitter pages build on these themes by providing regular real-time updates about what we’re up to and allowing users to interact directly with us online.
YouTube and FlickR enables people to access and comment on our offerings – and to share their own video and photographic resources – while this GORCC Talk Blog provides a space for generating ongoing commentary and dialogue about various aspects of the coast and pertinent issues.
It’s still early days for our new website and social media tools, and we’re still very much on our training wheels in this regard. However, we see these tools continually evolving as people start to use them to communicate and engage with us.
I encourage you to visit www.gorcc.com.au, to have a look around the site to see what’s there and to get the conversation going by telling us what you think, either by clicking on the homepage links to Facebook or Twitter, or by posting a comment here.
Over to you!
Posted by David Clarke, CEO.
Great Ocean Road Coast Committee Blog 