A website for your RSA

A branch Facebook page talks well to the members you already have. The people we think about are the other ones. Someone up late trying to work out whether there is help for their father, and who to ring about it. A veteran new to town, looking for the local RSA. A school or a family checking the time of the Anzac Day service. A group asking whether the hall can be hired. Those questions get asked on a phone, at odd hours, and they mostly turn up websites.

That is real work for a plain page to do. A page that says, in ordinary words, who to contact about support for a veteran or their family, with no login and no scrolling, gets a person to the right door on the night they went looking. Commemoration deserves the same: Anzac Day and Poppy Day details, findable by the whole town rather than only by the people already in the group. And the branch's own history, the honour boards and the story of how it began, gets a permanent home instead of living in a folder in a cupboard.

And the honest other side: if your branch already has a website that is current, that someone on the committee can get changed, and that a stranger can read on a phone, you don't need us. We'd rather say that here than take up your evening.

Every volunteer-run branch knows the story: the site was set up years ago by someone's son-in-law, the login went with him, the billing sat on a card that has since been cancelled, and now nobody can change the time of the service. That isn't a technology failure, it's an ownership failure.

Ours is built the other way. Your local RSA is its own organisation in its own right, usually an incorporated society or a trust, and the website should sit with the branch the same way the building does. So the domain is registered in the branch's name, never ours. Hosting is free, so there's no subscription to lapse when the treasurer hands over. The whole site can be exported free at any time, so you're not tied to us either. Handover to the next committee is one line in the folder: the website, changes by email to the studio, $20 a batch.

One thing worth saying plainly: we're an independent New Zealand studio. We have no connection to the national body and nothing we build implies one. The site is the branch's, and it says what the branch tells us to say.

The site is complete on the day it goes live. That's the honest premise: it says who you are, who to contact and what the branch marks, and it can stay exactly as it is for as long as the branch wants, free, forever. Hosting costs nothing, nothing renews, and a year in which nothing changes costs nothing at all.

It can also grow, because we stay behind it. The committee emails us what has changed, we draft it and send it back to be read, and it goes on the site once someone has approved it. A batch of changes is $20, so it's worth sending a few together, and a straightforward change can usually be done quickly. Nobody on the committee has to work on the site itself. What that allows, over years, is the part we'd care about most: the branch history deepened one story at a time as records surface, each year's Anzac Day details fresh well before the day, the welfare contacts always current so a family reaches the right person first time, and names from the honour boards given proper room on the page as families ask after them.

Every build can also include a site assistant, a quiet way for a visitor to ask a question and get an answer drawn from the site's own words, nothing invented. It's included in the price and switched on only if the branch wants it. All of it stays the branch's either way: the domain in the branch's name, nothing monthly, and the whole site exportable free at any time.