NPGA Benchmarking Council

The next NPGA Benchmarking Council meeting will be held in Denver, Colorado, on May 3-4, 2013. Participants are asked to register for the Benchmarking Council Meeting by Friday, April 19, 2013. Registering online is quick, easy and convenient! 

Individual Benchmarking groups meet on Friday, May 3, from 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., and on Saturday, May 4, from 8:00 a.m. – 12 noon.  The steering committee will meet on Friday morning, May 3, starting at 7:15 a.m.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER ONLINE

Optional Thursday Afternoon Workshop

SEO Basics & How It Can Help Your Business

When customers go the Internet for information, most use a search engine, such as Google, to locate the information.  Type in the search term “propane” in Google, and it finds 56,900,000 results in .31 seconds!  Search engines are serving up businesses like yours on their Results page every day.  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art and science of getting your website to show up as high as possible in the results returned by a search engine.  This generally means more visitors - think customers - to your site. SEO is very technical in nature, and for non-techies, it can be incredibly difficult to understand and apply best practices without the assistance of an expensive SEO consultant or website designer.  Metatags, meta descriptions, metamorphosis, spiders, bots…the terminology can be tough. Fortunately, the basic concepts are relatively straightforward – SEO is all about making your website as appealing to the search engines as it is your human visitors.  This presentation will present SEO basics for non-techies, and I promise not to use any really technical jargon.  By the end of the session, you’ll be familiar with basic SEO terms and simple strategies that can be used on your website so that the major search engines AND your customers will have a better chance at finding your content. 

This optional workshop begins at 3:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 2, at the Embassy Suites.  It is presented by Kay Howell, Chief Information Officer, Propane MaRC/Fulfillment for the Propane Education & Research Council (PERC) as part of the PERC-Benchmarking Council Alliance.

PERC Advisory Committee

The Advisory Committee’s objective is to bring together the expertise of our industry to assist in developing managing and overseeing the Council's investments. With industry input, we can better tackle the challenges that confront our industry and PERC in a more collaborative and comprehensive way. The committee is comprised of motivated volunteers with broad experience and expertise who use their background knowledge to evaluate potential projects, make recommendations to the Council on funding decisions and marketing strategies, and support projects through their membership on project teams.

The committee is organized into three working groups:

• Research & Technology Development Working Group supports technical research and the development and testing of new products.

• Safety & Training Working Group supports activities related to CETP, safety outreach & communications, and workforce, first responder, and technical/technician training.

• Market Outreach & Training Working Group supports activities related to industry and external audience outreach, marketer technology & sales training, and new product launch support.

As an advisory committee member, you will have a unique opportunity to work with your fellow propane professionals in shaping PERC’s programs and projects serving all markets and audiences. If you would like to sit in on the May 1-2 Advisory Committee meeting, join the committee, or would like more information, please contact Grace Willis at grace.willis@propane.com or 202-261-2219.