Building an Army of Official Trail Reporters
Great trails require a great community and one of the key foundations of Trailforks is an engaged community of not only Builders and Advocates, but also aware riders who understand the big picture. As a local non-profit Trail Association you are provided admin access to your region through a Trail Association group. All members of that group have the ability to add, edit and administrate the region. In addition, those users will have a badge next to their name and any trail reports added by those users are flagged as being official.
Multiple groups can be created within a region, this allows you to provide your Board of Directors with one level of admin access; and builders, trail stewards or region reps with a different level of admin privileges. Or you can assign various groups to different individual riding areas. The goal with Trailforks is to work best with your communities current programs, not for you to change what you do to work with Trailforks.
It's also possible to create groups that have no admin privileges but who's trail reports are still flagged as being official like pictured in the first two photos. A number of communities have used this feature to create an Official Reporter program or to further empower participants of trail maintenance education programs like Saint John Cycling's Trail Miners, the North Shore Mountain Bike Association's Shore Corps or the Rotorua Trails Trust's Trail Pixies.
In order to create a new Admin Group just go to your region on Trailforks. Click on the Admin tab at the top right corner, go to the groups page and add a new group. You can include a name, set visibility, add a logo and manage the users included in the group.
You can also assign individual users to various trails. Those trails will be listed on the users main page of Trailforks. This allows an Official Reports to see at a quick glance when the last time a report was submitted for one of their trails on Trailforks.
Your Official Reporters can also subscribe to email alerts for their specific trail or an entire region. When a new report is submitted, they'll be the first to know. If there's an issue on the trail, or with the trail report, then they can alert you without you having to manage every trail report in your region. Just like building a trail, many hands make light work and managing trail reports should be no different.
The user can choose if they want to be alerted every time a report is added or only a trail report the is Yellow, Orange or Red. It's up to them!
Here's some more detailed tutorials on subscribing to trails and regions that you can share with your Official Reporters:
Subscribing to a Trail
Subscribing to a Region
If you have any questions just send me an email, I'm here to help: mark.holloway@trailforks.com
@brenthillier @trailforks