So you want to build a Web site: How do you pay for it? The justification for developing a World Wide Web site is too often driven by dreams of financial windfalls and global dominance. The fact is that the revenue gained from advertising and the sale of products through the Internet is not yet substantial enough to be the sole driving force for your Internet strategies. Assuming this fact, how do you justify the investment in this technology? At CAUSE, the association for managing and using information resources in higher education, there are several strategies that drive our investments in Web technologies. Member driven CAUSE members are predominantly information technology professionals, so members expect CAUSE to make the appropriate use of technology in providing our services. Members that use our Internet-based information and services have developed an image of CAUSE as an indispensable resource in making decisions about managing and using information resources on campus. Image Based on the content and style of your Internet offerings, your association can appear as large (or small) as you wish. A three-person staff can give the impression of a global information resource. Similarly, a large organization can be viewed as superficial if it has a poorly designed Web site that lacks meaningful content. More efficient delivery of information Using the Internet and the Web, members can be reached instantly at a cost of just pennies. You can use the Internet to broadcast electronic messages, similar to a broadcast fax, announcing the latest information about your association. You can then refer members to your Web site if they want to explore a particular topic in more detail. On the CAUSE Web Site, we have published a great deal of information which we traditionally printed on paper. For example, we published the CAUSE membership directory, which originally was sent to all 4,000 members annually. After putting this directory on the Web, less than one percent of our members have requested a printed copy. This directory has full search capabilities, including member photos (with permission). By offering our membership directory, publication catalog, and other printed publications via the CAUSE Web Site, our organization has saved nearly $65,000 annually. Giving it all away CAUSE has made some of its publications available at no charge to anyone who visits our Web site. Our flagship journal CAUSE/EFFECT is available on our Web server in full color with a searchable index and embedded hyperlinks. Since its debut on-line, CAUSE/EFFECT subscriptions have had the largest increase in its history. Other CAUSE offerings have yielded similar results. We feel that the increases are due to two factors: first, increased visibility through Web exposure, and second, because people are still not comfortable reading through a 60-page journal on their computer screens. However, it is of great value to our members who come to the CAUSE server and search through back issues for a particular article. Advertising CAUSE does not currently have advertising as part of its Internet strategy. However, each CAUSE corporate member is given the opportunity to outline its products and services of interest to higher education on our web site. We think it is in the best interest of our members for CAUSE not to highlight products and services of one corporate member over another based on the amount of dollars spent on advertising. The CAUSE Web server does offer information from and about our members including Press Release and Job Posting services. Even though the general public may access these areas, only members have the ability to post information. This has resulted in more than a handful of organizations joining CAUSE just to use these services available only to our members. Bringing it all together Your Internet strategy should be carefully crafted. It should take into account the technological savvy of your membership, the image that you want to project, and the cost savings to your staff. The decision of whether or not to have a Web site should be as easy to make as owning a fax machine. Both are tools to deliver and gather information from your members. Could you justify the purchase of a fax machine solely on the amount of money it could generate for you, or would you justify it on the amount of savings and benefits gained from being able to quickly and more effectively communicate with your members? By Randy Richter Director, Information Resources - CAUSE