Sleeping On Events

Saturday morning, I intended to attend an Event held by a representative of the upcoming GeoWoodstock XXI. Unfortunately, I overslept and completely missed it. I am not renowned for being a morning person to begin with (unless a trip is involved—usually), but real life was total chaos for a couple of days, so I probably dropped a few balls, both caching-related and otherwise. But it brings up something I’ve been thinking about for a while. It’s pretty important and I think it needs to be addressed for the future of geocaching.

How many of you have been to Events in the last year or two and noticed mostly the same faces? When you have seen new faces, were they from the local community? I bet the answer is probably no. Heck, when I held a New Year’s Eve Event, it was worth noting that an unrecognized local cacher was in attendance. This may be an Austin issue, but I don’t think it is. I know there are new cachers out there; I see their names on find logs and new hides. But how can we get new people to come out of the woodwork and attend Events? I get that not everyone is a social type (as hard as it will be to believe, I’m not, either). But some people are. It stands to reason that a few new faces should be showing up from time to time, but they’re not. And I think it’s going to be a problem going forward. Putting new cachers in the vicinity of veteran cachers is one of the ways this entire thing propagates. It’s easy to get into geocaching; just download the app and you’re off to the races. It’s also just as easy to get out.

I believe the social ties that form are among the most important things that keep people caching. And that develops naturally when one cacher asks another for a hint for a hard-to-find cache. And when a cacher hears about some special cache someone else just returned from finding. And when a cacher learns about a challenge that people are working on, a trip being planned, or a new Mega that’s coming down the pipe. Lots of useful and interesting knowledge is waiting to be absorbed by new cachers attending Events. And the presence of new cachers brings vibrancy to a caching community. Even more importantly, it is likely to keep people in who might have flitted in and flitted back out, which is good for the communities and for geocaching as a whole.

You probably never think about Event notification and dissemination, but I think it’s the root of the issue. When you log in to your caching page on your computer, there’s a handy-dandy calendar that shows all the upcoming local Events for the current and following months. The problem is that a lot of cachers use their phones. In the app, Events show on the map, but no calendar shows when they’re coming up. Further, if you look at your caching page from your phone, the calendar won’t show up at all; it doesn’t display on mobile devices. Even further, when new caches are published, an email notification is sent out that something has dropped inside your set radius. Where is that notification for Events, CITOs, Megas? There may be a checkbox or setting that activates such a function, but I’ve yet to see it. If that last part is just a me problem, so be it, but there are probably a lot of other cachers who have the same issue. I am convinced that new cachers just do not know that Events are much of a thing or where to find them in their areas.

How do we do something about it? That’s the hard part. We veteran cachers (I have begun to consider myself a veteran cacher by this juncture) don’t have contact with new cachers, which is the problem! I know one cacher who sends out a standard welcome-to-geocaching message to new cachers when they find his hides, but that’s it as far as I’m aware. We also have a local BookFace group where info gets around, but let’s be real here: who under the age of thirty-five uses BookFace? BlueSky and the forum formerly known as Twitter have a wide reach, but wide is not what we need; local and targeted is. If there was a way to send bulk messages, you could send an upcoming Event list to a bunch of local cachers at once. But that only works if they check their messages, and there are too many ways that function could be abused, so it’s probably better that it’s not there. I’m just not seeing how we can reach out to them effectively. As much as I hate to say it, I think the solution can only come from above. I think this is a job for HQ. I have no doubt they’re working on it; they probably identified the issue long before I started considering it. More knowledgeable minds than mine have not yet found a solution. So we’ll have to keep doing what little we can, but we better keep thinking about this as well. If I hadn’t gotten in on my first few Events, I doubt you’d be reading any of this now. The next geocaching writer, podcaster, YouTuber, or TikToker could be the new face you encounter at the next Event.