A Comox Valley website regularly used by more than 300 community service groups has changed ownership.
Pieter Vorster, the founder of Pod Creative, has assumed responsibility for TideChange.ca, from the nonprofit World Community, and plans to expand its reach to a variety of secondary audiences.
This third iteration of TideChange will continue to fill an important need for nonprofit organizations.
A lack of consistent attention from the news media has always been the bane of community service organizations. The ability to publicize news and events beyond their devoted membership affects how successfully they find volunteers, raise funds and create community action … and avoid getting in each other’s way.
But small-town newspapers and broadcast outlets don’t have the space or time to publish everything that every community group is doing.
Chris Hillar, a former Department of Fisheries and Oceans employee, now retired, recognized back in the mid-2000s that Comox Valley non-governmental organizations needed an information hub. So he started a weekly email newsletter with information about the nonprofits he knew.
Nine years ago, the World Community Development Education Society picked up the idea and created TideChange as an online outlet for local groups to post their news and events. They employed a part-time editor, Angela Burns, to manage the site.
In just the last few years, Comox Valley groups have posted more than 4,000 articles on the website.
But this year, Burns retired from TideChange and World Community decided it had grown the website to the point where it could become self-sustaining.
On June 1, Vorster, also a volunteer with World Community, took on full ownership and management of the website. Now that the Comox Valley has only one news gathering organization and the demise of another local publication, InFocus, Vorster sees “a real need for alternative news.”
Vorster says TideChange will continue its original mission of publishing the news and information from community groups, and providing a community calendar of their events. While the community-at-large uses the calendar, the groups themselves also use it to avoid scheduling overlapping events.
But he also believes that it’s time to grow the website’s audience.
“With 3500+ regular monthly visitors, who tend to visit between 3 and 4 pages on our site, we have secured our target audience,” he said. “We believe that it is time now to grow our reach and include a variety of secondary audiences, who might even produce citizen journalists looking for an outlet for their media contributions
“Over the next few months we might expand … including a more comprehensive list of news posts and/or calendar entries from the community, in the aim of extending our reach and therefore the value of the service we provide. That having been said, we have every intention of stubbornly persisting with the underlying values of TideChange, keeping it close to the vision I helped build over these past years.”
Vorster said TideChange will “continue to function as a community connecting resource. Our community calendar features feeds from a variety of active local orgs, and remains a popular draw – for those planning their social activities and those producing/presenting those activities.”
Vorster became involved with TideChange through World Community, which he voluntarily assisted in their own website development.
Vorter has degrees in communications and dramatic arts from the University of the Orange Free State and a diploma in Creative Writing from the AAA School of Advertising (Cape Town, South Africa). He cut his teeth as a professional copywriter for three years at Saatchi & Saatchi.
Vorster became Managing Editor of FYI South – a bilingual city guide in Taiwan focusing on the southern region of the island. He moved to the Comox Valley with his wife, Caila and his daughters Juniper and Wren, in late 2008, and launched his home-based business (now Pod Creative).
Author’s note: I have served on the TideChange Advisory Committee for the past six months during this period of transition.
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