If the site fades and just becomes a social site for a few people that use it, that's not really a problem either.
You have a few ways to go with this. You can spend tremendous effort and do significant fundraising, put a
transition plan in place to bring in new leaders as you phase yourself out to relax and focus on other projects
and/or family. Or you can push yourself to actively grow and expand the site, bring in additional staff and
volunteers to help with outreach, promotion, and fundraising, working to establish a greater presence and
hosting and sponsoring events. Finally, you can just do a few quiet things but maintain the site as a passion
project and means of social interaction for the people that choose to.
I'm not recommending any of these actions and don't feel that any of them are "correct" in an ethical or
obligatory sense. Mainly because while I try to be an ethical sportsman and am pretty rigorous in following
the "leave no trace" ethos, I don't feel a calling to participate in large scale outreach and education for our
activity. Mainly because I know how much stress, effort, and huge amounts of energy and motivation it will
require to do successfully and I have other personal priorities that at this time push other things not only
into second place but a distant second place at that.
As for how to improve the site and get more people involved in it, you need to engage with other social
media platforms MUCH more actively. A complete revamp would be necessary to appeal to younger digital
natives in a manner that they prefer to use. A dedicated app at the very least that would allow tie-in with
other platforms, auto account creation using Apple/Google/FB/etc account, some kind of gamification of
the site that gives a sense of score-keeping (likes, etc) with badges, accomplishments, etc. Interactive fishing
logs that would let people post real-time when they are out fishing to show their catch, pin their locations,
or any of many other things that run counter to what the current users of this site enjoy (attracting more
people, fishers, and spectators to places that we can now go for some low-key relaxed fishing and making
spot-burning an almost into a triggered event with each report). Getting a dedicated IT team to build, update,
and add functionality to the site would be a big step for this. Preferably a group that can do native apps as
well as the mobile web based development. Just as an FYI, roughly 60-65% of all web traffic originates from
mobile devices now, and only 2-5% of mobile web traffic is from tablets... So the vast majority of web traffic
is from people using their cell phones. If you want more traffic and more activity, THAT is the group you need
to appeal to.
That's the catch-22 for this activity. In order to have enough people involved to have a big enough lobby and
voice to be heard to keep it accessible for ourselves, it needs to be popular enough and accessible for every
one. Otherwise it's just a matter of time until we all become poachers when fishing by members of the public
gets regulated to the point that it's not really feasible to follow the rules because there will be just so many of
them.
but it's nice to dream, isn't it?