Texas Wing - Civil Air Patrol
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Historian - Texas Wing Website Merits Balsem Award of Excellence
The Major Howell Balsem Exceptional Achievement Awards recognize excellence in ten major categories of the CAP Public Affairs Program nationally. In turn, these categories are broken down into subcategories. Competition for these awards is open to all Civil Air Patrol members.
The Balsem Awards are judged by a panel of public relations practitioners with expertise in the various categories, who are not associated with Civil Air Patrol.
The awards program is administered by a committee of PAOs headed by the National Public Affairs Team Leader and the NHQ Deputy Director, Public Affairs. At least two judges are selected annually in each of the ten categories and the winners are selected based solely on the judges’ view of each entry’s creativity and overall effectiveness, with emphasis on following the four-step planning process.
The Texas Wing website was not born in a vacuum. Over the years, it had been added to by three webmasters working more or less in concert, but the resulting site was difficult to navigate and even harder to maintain. In May, 2009, when the remaining webmaster left Texas Wing and no one offered to take up the position, Maj. Arthur Woodgate, the SWR Director of Public Affairs, volunteered for the job, readily accepted by Wing Commander Col. Joe R. Smith.
The main design principle was to achieve easy navigation within a framework of simplicity, eliminating distractors wherever possible. The secondary goal was to allow easy use with the hand-held technology of the time, when many members had Blackberry smart phones that could not display graphics, yet they would profit from being able to access the website during a mission or emergency. The result is the present architecture, offering a traditional version called desktop, and a text-only version called mobile.
Capt. Sandra Smith was instrumental in helping select the most practical solution as she worked an exercise in the field. Once adopted, the final version empowered CAP members to access documents stored on the website, download them to a local PC or printer, process them, and then upload them via the smart phone for distribution.
The new site's ease of navigation, practical data management, features, and usability were deciding factors in earning the Texas Wing website a Balsem Award of Excellence, announced at the 2010 National Boards and Annual Conference in San Diego.
Maj. Arthur E. Woodgate, CAP, SWR Director of Public Affairs