I'm hoping to set up an easy(ish) way for a one design fleet to keep a crew pool so the entire fleet can get on the water as often as possible. We expect most owners to not have full regular crews and many of the crew pool to be sailors in the club that are not committed to any one boat. The goals:
1) Easy to get people in the communication loop
2) Something appropriate for finding last-minute crew
3) Not blowing up phones with an insane number of messages, especially since many crew are/will not be "regular" crew in the fleet.
I've been in crew pools for single boats before. There, group texts are fine, but if this is several boats looking for crew for weekly racing and more with the larger number of people for a full fleet I think it would get out of hand quickly. Email lists are probably OK for 1 and 3, but not 2. Facebook groups probably satisfy 2 and 3 but not sure about 1, especially for younger people - the exact group I am most interested in bringing in. I don't have much experience with Whatsapp, but think it might have the same issue. I also thought of trying Discord or Slack, but again people need an account to access the groups.
Has anyone else tried something like this and had success? Failure? Feedback? Lessons learned?
1) Easy to get people in the communication loop
2) Something appropriate for finding last-minute crew
3) Not blowing up phones with an insane number of messages, especially since many crew are/will not be "regular" crew in the fleet.
I've been in crew pools for single boats before. There, group texts are fine, but if this is several boats looking for crew for weekly racing and more with the larger number of people for a full fleet I think it would get out of hand quickly. Email lists are probably OK for 1 and 3, but not 2. Facebook groups probably satisfy 2 and 3 but not sure about 1, especially for younger people - the exact group I am most interested in bringing in. I don't have much experience with Whatsapp, but think it might have the same issue. I also thought of trying Discord or Slack, but again people need an account to access the groups.
Has anyone else tried something like this and had success? Failure? Feedback? Lessons learned?