INTERACTIVE HOMEPAGE OF NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION

Kim Fagerudd and Eija Koskivaara

Kemisk-Tekniska Fakulteten, Åbo Akademi Univeristy, Turku School of Economics

Rehtorin pellonkatu 3, 20540 Turku, Finland

Keywords: Non-profit organisation, sport, well-being, homepage.

Abstract: This paper presents how local orienteering club with the interactive homepage attract new members, and

communicate with people interested in or involve with the club. Especially, the children and youth sector is

presented. This communication way is important in the city, where orienteering places are around the city

and surroundings. Orienteering really is a hobby for the whole family – a real sport for all who wants to

promote physical activity with metal and social well-being. It can be practised almost anywhere in the

world, in all kinds of terrain from parks to woods. A map and a compass, and suitable outdoor clothes are all

you need to get started. Orienteers navigate their way round a with the map and compass. To reach

orienteering places is challenging, especially for newcomers, as the physical activity place changes almost

every time, otherwise orienteer’s learns the terrain too well and the mental feedback is not so rewarding

anymore. The interactive homepage of youth sector have eight items.

1 INTRODUCTION

The non-profit organisations exist because they can

better provide, compared to business and public

sector organisations, services and goods that, are

difficult to charge on economically appropriate price

(Barrett, Balloun & Weinstein 2005). Voluntary

activities form the basis of the Finnish Sports culture

and traditionally sports clubs are organised in non-

profit associations (SLU 2006). Orienteering is a

good example of physical activity, where the total

amount of work needed to organise an orienteering

exercise or competition is huge and challenging,

including such thing as map-making and course

setting, and therefore very seldom orienteering is

economically profitable. And, at the same time,

orienteering really is a hobby for the whole family –

a real sport for all who wants to promote physical

activity with metal and social well-being. It can be

practised almost anywhere in the world, in all kinds

of terrain from parks to woods. A map and a

compass, and suitable outdoor clothes are all you

need to get started. Orienteers navigate their way

round a with the map and compass.(IOF 2006)

Therefore, orienteering society has room for

motivated and creative persons (Amabile 1998) in

order to keep the sport going on.

In the last few decades, advances in information

technologies and the adoption of the Internet in

particular have attracted the attention of many

academics and practitioners alike. Much of current

research, however, is focused on for-profit

organisations, and less emphasis has been placed on

other organisational contexts, such as the non-profit

sector. The purpose of this article is to analyse how

orienteering club Turun Suunnistajat ry (TuS) with

the interactive homepage (www.turunsuunnistajat.fi)

attract new members, and communicate with people

interested in or involve with the club (TuS 2006).

This communication way is important in the city,

where orienteering places are around the city and

surroundings. To reach orienteering places is

challenging, especially for newcomers, as the

physical activity place changes almost every time,

otherwise orienteer’s learns the terrain too well and

the mental feedback is not so rewarding anymore.

This paper focus on how the interactive

homepage can promote the mission (Mullen 2006)

of the club and support the voluntary work of club

(Sawhney, Wolcott & Arroniz 2006). The article

proceeds as follows. Section 2 gives an overview of

TuS and the use and adaptation of information and

communication technologies (ICT) in orienteering in

general. Section 3 analyses the interactive homepage

of TuS especially focusing on Youth sector. The

175

Fagerudd K. and Koskivaara E. (2007).

INTERACTIVE HOMEPAGE OF NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION.

In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Society, e-Business and e-Government /

e-Learning, pages 175-178

DOI: 10.5220/0001290001750178

 SciTePress

analysis is based on the instrument developed

specially on Web portals quality measurement

(Yang, Cai, Zhou & Zhou 2005). Section 4 suggest

further development issues for the promoting

orienteering and other sports clubs’ mission in order

to physical activity with mental and social well-

being.

2 CASE CLUB AND ICT IN

ORIENTEERING

TuS is a non-profit organisation with over 500

hundred members living in more than 20 different

municipalities in Finland. Over 300 members have

competition license of Finnish Orienteering

Federation (SSL 2006). TuS’s primary mission is to

promote the sport of orienteering in Turku area. TuS

is very active with a lot of trainings and activities in

the region around Turku. TuS is one of the most

colourful orienteering clubs at the moment and

joining the club is easy. In the spring 2006 TuS

achieved The Young Finland Association’s Seal

Club certificate for it’s quality of activities for

children and youth (Nuori_Suomi 2006).

TuS organisation is divided into four sectors:

competitions, elite, youth, and exerciser sectors.

Almost all the work is done on voluntary basis by

club members, and the different sectors help each

other. This kind of voluntary working is very

traditional in Scandinavian sport and physical

activity clubs. For example, in other Western

European countries sport is organised more on

company basis.

Information and communication technology

(ICT) has brought significant changes in the

structure and functioning of orienteering during the

past decade. The core element of orienteering, map,

is digitalized. From this follows that also course

setting is digitalized. Indeed, the time taking system,

emit™ or SportIdent™, with time analysis of the

competions are over ten years old. Combining

digital map, on-line time taking and a Global

Positioning System-based trucking system and

software reveals the routes of runners as well as the

differences between competitors online. This kind of

system is already in use in some competitions. There

are less and less secrets, if the system is fully utilised

and especially the audience really may follow the

race. Also very many administrative things such as

registration for competition or information about

different kind of activities are digitalized and moved

into www-environment. Not to mentioned all kind of

normal registration and administrative systems used

in the office work. We may conclude that the

adoption of ICT in orienteering at least in the best

clubs seems to be high. According to (Finn, Maher

& Forster 2006) the non-profit organisations are in

the beginning to position themselves to take

advantage of the opportunities provided by ICT

adoption. (Pinho & Macedo 2006) found that the

existence of a favourable attitude towards the

Internet was positively correlated with the

perception of Internet benefit dimensions. It seems

that the innovative and creative climate in

orienteering society have managed to create an

environment which support the whole sport (Hamm

2006). Explanation for this kind of team effect might

lie partly in the military sport background of the

sport and partly high educational level of the

participants of the orienteering sport. Indeed, quite a

many of orienteering are engineers.

3 THE INTERACTIVE

HOMEPAGE OF TUS

Increasing numbers of non-profit organisations have

set up material on their homepage as a way of

providing users with information about their

products or services. This section analysis the

interactive homepage of TuS, special focus is on

youth sector, with the instrument to measure user

perceived service quality of homepage. The

interactive homepage of youth sector have eight

items: youth news, group presentation, activity

calendar, junior presentation, question of the week,

youth activity, rules of the game, and contact

information. The analysis instrument is developed

by (Yang et al. 2005) and it based on TAM-model

(Davis 1989), which suggest that user’s decision to

adopt an IT is primary determined by their attitude

toward usefulness and ease of use. (Yang et al.

2005) argues that their conceptual model provides a

useful instrument for researchers who wish to

measure the service quality of web portal

(homepage) and for managers who want to improve

their service performance. They argue that there are

five quality dimensions of homepage: usability,

usefulness of content, adequacy of information,

accessibility, and interaction. In the following

paragraphs we analyse TuS homepage with the

special focus on youth sector with these dimensions

(Yang et al. 2005). The emphasis in the analysis is in

the fact that the members of the youth committee are

totally voluntary workers.

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Usability in the homepage context is related to

user friendliness. The friendliness contains e.g. the

following items: content layout and classification,

web site structure, user interface, appearance and

visual design, intuitiveness, readability, search

facilities, and ease of navigation. Technical features

belong also to usability dimensions. The TuS

homepage is organised according to club’s main

sectors and activities. These are organised in six

different menus in the upper edge of the main page.

They are: general information of the club, arranging

competitions to orienteers in other clubs, elite

athletics, youth, and links (see Figure 1). The main

layout of the page has three categories such as

interactive part on the left, news in the middle, and

logos and links of the co-operating partner on the

right side. On the left side of the page is login link

for the club members. From the menu available only

for club member can be found several useful

information about the club (Intranet and members

own settings) and the possibilities to upload

information and news into the homepage and update

the activity calendar. Webmaster has his/her own

menu to control the functionality of the homepage.

On the left side of the homepage is also the calendar,

which shows the weekly program of the whole club.

News and calendar can easily sort by the activity or

sector. The homepage is based on PHP-language and

they use MySQL-database. PHP is an HTML-

embedded scripting language. Much of its syntax is

borrowed from C, Java and Perl with a couple of

unique PHP-specific features thrown in. The goal of

the language is to allow web developers to write

dynamically generated pages quickly. PHP/MySQL

makes the homepage easy, clear, and quick to

download. The layout of the homepage is read from

template folder, which makes customising quite

easy. The functional and design code for the

homepage are diverged. More detailed information

about the technical can be found from the serves

provider’s homepage (Clubpage 2006). There is no

search facility in TuS homepage as there still are less

than one hundred pages overall, which is one rule of

thumb for specific search facilities.

Figure 1: Content layout of TuS main page.

Usefulness of content refers to the value,

reliability and accuracy of information. Every sector

of the club, i.e. the voluntary workers or club

members, are responsible to update the information

related to their activities. For example, Youth news

tell the recent happenings of the young athletes. It is

like e-Newspaper and everybody may contribute the

content. Especially, members of the youth

committee are responsible to keep the information

updated. The group presentation tells the general

information how the youth sector operates. Youth

activity and rules of the game presents the values

behind the operation. The rules of the game are

made up with children and their parents. These latter

two items are partly focused on the promotion of the

mission of the youth sector. Activity calendar tells

all the activities of the club and it is possible to make

inquiries based on year, month, category (elite

runners, youth, hobbyist, all, and club house). The

activity calendar also contains the maps of the city in

order to help new comers to find the place of

activity. The TuS homepage is updated almost daily,

thanks to active club members.

Adequacy of information is concerned with

completeness of information. The current homepage

in at the moment one year old and there are over 200

submissions of the news. The completeness of the

information is very much depending of the time,

competence, and attitude of the club members

(voluntary workers) to provide information to the

homepage.

Accessibility refers to availability and

responsiveness. Customers expect the online

services to be available at all times and speedy on

processes. The person in charge in the different

sectors answers the questions as soon as possible

regarding their work and other responsibilities. The

main language of the TuS Homepage is Finnish, but

as much as possible is also translated in English in

order to higher the accessibility of the club among

non-Finns.

Interaction involves three types of operations

between: user and service provider, user and web

site, and among peer users of similar services. The

web master, voluntary worker) of the homepage is

responsible person to communicate with the service

provider. The web master helps the members to

upload the information on the main menus.

However, the idea is that the uploading of

information is possible without any help. All the

registered club members are allowed to upload news

and activities for the calendar. In junior presentation

every young athlete may have their own diary,

guestbook, and collection of training hours to share

INTERACTIVE HOMEPAGE OF NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION

177

with others. Question of the week deals with the

content of orienteering and there are three possible

answers. The response is given weekly in face-to-

face activity. This is one way to combine both the

new media and traditional way doing and exercising

orienteering. Furthermore, the homepage includes

link to the e-Registration of competition as well as

the links for the competitions and the local

orienteering activities.

4 CONCLUSIONS

In this paper we have presented how local

orienteering club promote it’s mission with the help

of interactive homepage. The homepage was

analysed with the help of five quality dimensions

such as usability, usefulness of content, adequacy of

information, accessibility, and interaction.

The usability lies heavily on content layout and

technical functionality of the homepage. TuS

homepage uses PHP/MySQL-combinaton which

makes the homepage easy, clear, and quick to

download. However, the service provider is a tiny

company and the web master of TuS homepage

works on voluntary basis. These two things make the

service very vulnerable and have to take account in

the future planning of the homepage. Usefulness of

the content as well as the adequacy of the

information and accessibility deeply depends on

voluntary workers of the sector. This means that

every sector have to understand also the power of

new media to promote orienteering. Interaction

depends a great deal on how useful and updated the

information at the homepage is for both club

members as well as newcomers. For non-profit

organisation this is a challenge. However, if people

are motivated and the tasks are not too demanding

we think the interactive homepage works within the

non-profit sector’s organisation.

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