Once more I want to suggest something regarding the problem how to attract new members outside of the US / not-English-speaking countries.
They probably ask themselves: "Why would I register to an online community overseas where I have to communicate in a foreign language with people I´ll never have the opportunity to meet for a run?"
I know that it would be a lot of work to create duplicates of the site in other languages. On Facebook or youtube, for example, you can switch to a different language and every menu-item appears then in the other language (not the content, though, like on Wikipedia.). This is not an option at the moment, I know that.
But here´s an easy way how we could still reduce barriers for people all over the world. We could add a drop-down menu in the main menu (right after IBRD, for example).
This menu would contain flags of all countries that have a chapter (US, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Czech & Slovak Republic, and so forth). Like this one:
(it is taken from the German Merrell site).
And when you hit a particular flag, you´re directed to the respective Chapter. There you can see that there are folks nearby who speak your own language and maybe even meet for a run.
How about that?
They probably ask themselves: "Why would I register to an online community overseas where I have to communicate in a foreign language with people I´ll never have the opportunity to meet for a run?"
I know that it would be a lot of work to create duplicates of the site in other languages. On Facebook or youtube, for example, you can switch to a different language and every menu-item appears then in the other language (not the content, though, like on Wikipedia.). This is not an option at the moment, I know that.
But here´s an easy way how we could still reduce barriers for people all over the world. We could add a drop-down menu in the main menu (right after IBRD, for example).
This menu would contain flags of all countries that have a chapter (US, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Czech & Slovak Republic, and so forth). Like this one:
(it is taken from the German Merrell site).
And when you hit a particular flag, you´re directed to the respective Chapter. There you can see that there are folks nearby who speak your own language and maybe even meet for a run.
How about that?