jaybird78 wrote:Great response Bob, if we expect change to occur we all need to do our part in order to make it happen. With that being said, what are we doing to make this association grow? Is there a plan?
Great questions Jonathan!!
There are lots of directions we can go to grow the US Hawks. It all depends on how each of us wants to spend their time and energy. One of my main focuses has been on recruiting new Chapters. A recent example was my trip to New Mexico last month to answer questions of the RGSA when they were considering joining us. Bill and Sam have been a huge help in that regard. So if you know of any Chapters (or would like to start one in your area) that would be a big step.
There's another big step that someone (a brave someone) could take. One of the largest hang gliding web sites is
hanggliding.org. The operator of that site is a fellow named Jack Axaopoulos. Jack makes money from the ads on his site, and he is determined to keep any other site from out-growing his site (I believe that's why he killed the HGAA). In fact, he's actually set up his web site (hanggliding.org) to automatically change the links that people post so that there are no links (absolutely zero) from his site to the US Hawks. If you find that hard to believe, go there and post a comment like:
Hello Hang Gliding Pilots,
I just want to let everyone know that there's a new hang gliding association getting started at:
[url=http://ushawks.org]ushawks.org[/url]
Check it out.
That's a pretty innocent post. But when you check your post, you'll find that his software has automatically changed the link from "ushawks.org" to something else (the last time I checked, he was changing them to "loserville.org"). Jack is pretty smart about the web, and he knows that Google ranks sites based on who links to them. By ensuring that there are ZERO links from hanggliding.org to ushawks.org, he's ensuring that our site is ranked somewhere down around page 10 when searching Google for the phrase "hang gliding".
Now if you do post a link to US Hawks (on hanggliding.org), and find that it gets changed, you could start a discussion about it. My guess is that Jack will ban you from his forum at that time. He uses the fear of being banned to keep people from speaking out. So that's a risk that you'd have to accept if you wanted to spread the word about the US Hawks on his forum.
Eventually, I believe more and more people will begin to understand what's going on ... one pilot and club at a time. And eventually, I think some of them will challenge Jack for banning people for daring to even mention the US Hawks. That's when we'll start to get more exposure which will really help us grow. Until then, I'm just spreading the word ... one pilot and one club at a time.
by jaybird78 » Fri Feb 14, 2014 1:29 pm 
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