NCWCD CellPhoneTour 95%ProgReport

Home Browse Search

~ Northern Colorado Wa~er Conservancy Distric~ ~~ 220 Water Avenue. Berthoud, CO 80513 . 970-532-7700 . fax 970-532-0942 . www.ncwcd.org Progress report for Water Efficiency Grant June 15 - 95% completion Cell phone audio tour of the Conservation Gardens at Northern Water As of June 15, we had reached our goal of having the cell phone audio tour ready for the public - with a couple modifications to the original plan. As reported in our previous progress report, the signs to mark the various stops on the tour provided a challenge. When we went to order them, the sign company told us they would be substantially more money than they had quoted us. In light of this, we decided to create very-low-cost, temporary signs until we could find permanent signs within our budget. We printed out signs on our color printer, laminated them and stapled them to wooden stakes pur- chased at a local hardware store. This way we could still launch the tour on June 15. Just as we were trying to track down bids from other sign companies, Schlosser Signs (the company we had planned to use) called us and said they had calculated the price incorrectly and that the signs would, in fact, cost what they had originally told us. We decided to keep the temporary signs in place for two to three weeks to see if visitors could find them easily and test if they are an appropriate color, size and height. We will order the permanent signs in the coming weeks. Our pop-up banners have also proved to be a little difficult to keep in place when strong wind gusts blow through our back yard. The plastic frames just are not strong enough to keep them upright. We are working with our facilities department to try to secure them to the ground better with some rope and stakes. We still believe the pop-up banners are very important to inform visitors about the tour and the phone number to call. Our first advertisement ran in the Old Berthoud Recorder as scheduled on June 14. The ad will also run in the Loveland Daily Reporter-Herald, Berthoud Weekly Surveyor and Longmont Daily Times-Call according to the schedule outlined in the grant request. Recording the tour turned out to be relatively easy. We are generally pleased with the quality of the audio con- sidering it was recorded using the handset of an office telephone. We assembled a test group of several employees the week of June 11 to test out the tour and give us their feed- back. We didn't give them any additional instructions other than to head out back and take the tour. We wanted to see if they could figure out how to use the tour, find the signs, understand and enjoy the content, etc. As a result of their comments, we made a couple minor changes to the audio prompts -- i.e. during the introductory prompt we added a sentence to orient callers with where the Intepretive Area is relative to the Conservation Gardens. We sent out a press release on June 19 (a few days after we had planned to) to about a dozen media outlets in the region. The Old Berthoud Recorder has already run a story, and the Denver Post and 9News both have indi- cated interest in covering the tour. Jill plans to follow up with the other media outlets.