It was about three years ago when the Scouts Executive Director, Winston Hayle, approached Liz Smith … someone he had known for several years due to her involvement in her church and the Cayman community. At that particular time, Liz was being interviewed on a radio programme called “Off the Record” hosted by our own Chief Scout Commissioner Orrett Connor. Although the interview with Liz had to do with the Breast Cancer Awareness campaign by the Lions Club of Tropical Gardens, their conversation during intermission or after the interview led to discussion about website development. The information was shared further and Liz was invited by Mr. Hayle to support the Cayman Islands Scouts Association in this manner.
Executive Commissioner Winston said that he was pleasantly surprised when Liz contacted him one day in July 2021 to offer her window of opportunity to build the website; and readily embraced her commitment to re-establish and develop the CI Scouts website. Having discussed the extent of what the scouts were expecting, Liz introduced the assistance of BluJhADe, a company that provides services in marketing, branding and business development/operations support services. Scout Leader Gregory Black was also introduced as he would be integrally involved in the project.
Mr. Hayle explained that they had a website which eventually went flat as the Administrator left the island and took all of the information with him. As he (Mr. Hayle) was not familiar with building or managing websites, he was not engaged in that aspect of scouts hence having little knowledge of its development. What was available to CI Scouts however were the several pieces of information and “tons of pictures”. The next step was to add some structure to the project. Aliya Dunstan of BluJhADe, gave assurance of her company’s availability to make the project a reality. She introduced her colleagues Michael Russell of Aries83 as the Creative Director and Ted Taylor as the Technical Director to produce a robust and enterprising website. Recognizing that writing articles, stories, news items would be a critical need, Liz proposed a Writers’ Workshop for the scouts so that they could appropriately contribute to rebuilding the website. In the interim, BluJhADe established a domain name, email addresses and online repository for receiving and storing media files and other documents. The Lions Club of Tropical Gardens was engaged through its contribution of Liz’s time and effort.
Fast forward to now, the CI Scouts website is still in its development stage however ready to be shared with family and very close friends to give a taste of what is to come … and engage them in contributing photographs, anecdotal stories of their experiences, and other articles for an interesting and dynamic information hub.