(link to podcast)

00:15 Chris Ronan: Hello, everybody, welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ. This is the podcast about what’s happening at Geocaching HQ, in Seattle. My name is Chris Ronan, my username is Rock Chalk. I am one of the 80 or so lackeys, who works at HQ. And on this episode of our podcast, I am catching up with a couple of members of the CE team, of HQ. That would be Andrew and Emily. The CE team does a whole lot of stuff at HQ, they are the folks that, if you write in with a question about your… Maybe you have a problem with your account, maybe you’re having trouble with the Geocaching app, any number of countless things that you could write in about, it’s the CE team that’s going to be answering those questions. They also come up with all the really cool content on Geocaching’s social media channels, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all that stuff, this is the team of folks, that does those things. So, here is me, and Andrew, and Emily, talking about everything the CE team does at Geocaching HQ. Here we go.

[music]

01:28 CR: Okay, so Andrew and Emily from the CE team. Thank you both, for taking some time out from your respective, undisclosed locations.

[chuckle]

01:41 Andrew: Yeah, thank you for having us. It’s a joy to be on this podcast, I’ve been… I’ve been to HQ for a couple of years now, and I kept hearing about it. Yeah, happy to be here.

01:50 CR: You finally made it, both of you. Or you were finally wrangled in, I don’t know which one is more accurate, but…

01:57 Emily: Yeah.

01:57 Andrew: We’ll leave that one between us. [chuckle]

01:58 Emily: I’ve been dreaming of being on this podcast, so…

02:03 CR: Have you?

02:04 Emily: I have.

02:04 CR: That’s exciting.

02:06 Emily: I used to listen, even before I started at HQ. So, I’m a long-time fan.

02:12 CR: Long-time listener, first time caller, I guess, as they say. Well, Andrew, let’s start by just giving people an overview of what the CE team is at HQ. What does it mean, and who all is on it, and just kind of a rough overview of what the team does on a day-to-day basis.

02:33 Andrew: Yeah, so the CE team, the Community Engagement team, handles all of your questions, if you have ever written in to Geocaching HQ, it’s our team who will help you try to find a solution, or anything technical-related, any type of geocache disagreements, we’ll help mediate those kinds of situations, we’ll help people drop a trackable, we’ll just teach about geocaching. There might even be like private property disputes that we often get involved in, a whole range of issues. But we also work real closely with the engineers in troubleshooting issues. So if you’ve ever experienced a bug on your app or on the website, and written in to us, we’ve probably asked you a whole lot of strange questions, and that’s just to gather as much information we can to send off to the engineers who really know what’s going on, and then they can fix the issue for you.

03:29 Andrew: But that’s not all we do on the CE team. We’re a team of… Full of all sorts of different activities and skills. One of my favorite things that I like to say is that, I get to manage a team that has people who speak a language other than English. We have Spanish represented on the team, we have French represented on the team, we have German represented on the team, and we’ve had Italian represented on the team as well, so everyone can speak another language, other than English, which is super important, of course, in the game, Geocaching. And then, the other part of our job is managing all of our social media. So, formerly, when I first started at HQ, I was creating content for our Instagram, and Facebook, and Twitter, and now, I’m more or less just overseeing it, and people like Emily, or Yara, or Megan, or Genevieve, are creating the content that you’re all seeing on the blog, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

04:28 CR: And Emily, you mentioned, you’ve been at HQ for a little bit here. How did you start here? And what is your day-to-day, like?

04:37 Emily: Yeah, so I first got into geocaching with my family, and I knew someone who worked here in the past, and they talked about how awesome it was, so I started listening to the podcast, just learned more about what everyone does at HQ, and what the roles are. So I started at Geocaching HQ in October of last year, in 2019, and I started first, as the Guest Experience Coordinator. So I was welcoming geocachers in, from all over the world into our Visitors Center at HQ, which is super fun, I got to meet a lot of different people. But that changed, with the pandemic, we had to, unfortunately, close down our Visitors Center. But the great thing was, I was already helping out, I was on the CE team as the Guest Experience Coordinator, but I had been helping them out with their support tickets, and with some of like the content sourcing. So I was able to transition to a Community Coordinator role in April.

05:44 CR: Andrew, you’ve been at the company for how many years, now?

05:48 Andrew: I’ve been at the company now, for, let’s see, three years, 361 days. Not counting.

05:56 CR: Wow, that’s… I’m picturing this wall where you’ve just been crossing off… Like in those prison movies, where you see somebody crossing off the dates.

06:05 Andrew: Well, since they’ve closed down HQ, I can’t keep scratching off on my wall.

06:12 CR: This game seems pretty simple. You find a cache, you log a cache. But it isn’t that simple really. There are a lot of little idiosyncrasies and quirky things and things that are very special about this game. How does that make your role on the CE team maybe a little bit more challenging? Because you can’t just come in and know it all. I think you have to play the game and be around the community, and over time, you learn so much more that will enable you to be much more helpful when people write in with the whole range of questions that you almost get.

06:57 Andrew: I’d be curious to hear from Emily, because Emily was formerly a geocacher and then she transitioned to being a lackey. So what’s the contrast between the knowledge you had previously to being a lackey compared to now? ‘Cause I know all the questions and stuff that you’re answering.

07:17 Emily: Yeah, ’cause when I did it before, it was just for fun, and typically I did some multi-caches, but I mainly just did traditional caches. I didn’t do too much with trackables just because depending on the caches you’re finding it can be difficult to find a cache with the trackable in it. So I didn’t have a lot of experience with the more nuanced aspects of the game. And since starting, I’ve realized, yeah, there’s so many different ways people can personalize their hides… It’s really cool to hear about all the challenges that people have for themselves and how they’ve really gamified the game even more. Yeah, it seems so simple on the surface. And then you start talking to people. I love going to the events and meeting geocachers because you just get to hear about ways in which they’ve explored the world through the game and they’ve used it as like a tourist type, tourism itinerary, and they’ve just like… Especially in retirement, like they’ve kept their life very exciting by going out and finding geocaches and traveling. So, yeah, I never realized how much this game really means to people.

08:35 Andrew: Emily…

08:35 CR: Yeah… Oh, go ahead, Andrew.

08:38 Andrew: Ah, yeah, I was just gonna say it means a whole lot to people, and you can tell that it comes through in the writing that we get. And one thing I tell any new member student, community engagement team, or I’ve said to everyone now that’s currently on team, is you’ll likely learn something new every day.

08:57 Emily: That’s true.

08:58 Andrew: I’ve been here for almost four years, and I’m still learning new things every day, and it is often that it comes in the form of a question that a geocacher poses because they’re curious. “Well, have we thought of that before? Somebody at HQ has thought of this before? It’s gotta be documented somewhere.” So you start to reach out to some of our older standing members at HQ, people who’ve been working there for eight plus years, and they got answers for things like, “Oh yeah, five years ago, this one thing happened, and that’s why this is the case that it is,” and that’s something that keeps me really engaged and curious and it makes me excited to answer tickets and emails.

09:41 CR: Is it difficult when you first start? Because for me, I came in with a lot of experience as a cacher which, I think, was really helpful, but I have a lot of empathy for people that come into the company with any less experience than I had, because even I came in and it felt a little overwhelming because I was seeing questions come up that even I hadn’t thought of with several years of caching experience. So I think for… I’m interested to hear your all’s take on that.

10:09 Andrew: I think for me, I felt like I was going back to college. [chuckle] You know what? HR provides us with the Idiot’s Guide to Geocaching, it was just so funny. And so you’re instructed like, “Go, and then read through this, and then try to understand it.” And so I remember I was like highlighting things and taking notes, and then I was online doing all sorts of research to try to get caught up because it’s… Before I was working at Geocaching, I had done it, I understood it as a concept, just [10:38] __ had a very high level. And then, once things got… I got through the onboarding process, I said, “Wow, that’s… I really got a lot of catching up to do. There’s a lot of niche areas of this website, there’s a lot of niche aspects of the game, and I’m gonna have to understand them all because at some point I’m gonna have to talk from a point of expertise and that expertise needs to be backed up.” So it truly was like… I think for the first year, it was like college, it just felt like college.

[chuckle]

11:12 Emily: Yeah, they give you that Idiot’s Guide to Geocaching that says, “Please return to HR after onboarding.” [chuckle] But yeah, I did a lot of reading during my onboarding on our blog, on our website, yeah, a lot of reading of other people’s geocaching blogs, just try to get the different perspectives. And then the other thing that’s nice is we do have so much experience at this company, so, Chris, I know I have reached out to you before for help with tickets. [chuckle]

11:45 CR: Sure, yeah.

11:47 Emily: So it’s so great being able… Everyone is so helpful and so supportive at Geocaching, but you kinda learn who you can reach out to for certain things and who’s kind of an expert on certain things, so that I’ve learned so much just from you and other people with a lot of experience in the game.

12:07 CR: How many questions would you say the team answers on a typical day?

12:13 Andrew: On a typical day… I’ll answer this two parts. When… There’s like a geocaching off-season, and then there’s a geocaching season, so in our cue that’s kind of how we refer to it as. So pretty much once April happens or Easter, geocaching really takes off around the world, so we will get maybe 120 to maybe 180 emails a day average during the geocaching season. If there’s a bug or an issue, that could skyrocket to 300 to 400 emails, all being answered by a team of four and sometimes five people. If it’s the off-season, then we could get maybe 30 to… Upwards to 80 tickets per day. People are still geocaching around the world, just not in as high numbers.

13:03 CR: I think that people have a misconception about writing in the companies and they assume that it’s either almost a robotic way of response, like there’s auto-responses that happen, or there’s entire wings of people that are… And I think I always try to mention to people when they ask about HQ, or if I’m giving someone a tour of the office, I say, here it is, these are the folks and you all are reading and answering everything, it’s not… I mean sometimes it might seem like it’s a canned response because there are certain questions that I expect you get a lot, and so you maybe have a template for an answer, but somebody reads every one of these emails… Right.

13:46 Andrew: Every single one, we try to respond to everyone within 24 hours, and I think we usually average around between 10 or 12 to occur per ticket that comes in.

13:57 CR: Are there certain subjects or topics that you hear about more than others?

14:03 Emily: We have all of our logistical topics that come up a lot like payment questions, technical support. Those are huge.

14:14 Andrew: Yeah, yeah, a lot of… I think the highest volume of tickets are in more like the My Account, people want their home coordinates set or they want to know, How do I set up offline lists or instant notifications? We try to help them with that. Of course, like payments a huge one that we handle this one super, super important. I personally like dealing with really difficult, really difficult tickets that don’t necessarily have an immediate solution, like it takes some investigating, you have to maybe look at a couple of profiles, maybe consult with a reviewer, consult with your team, Chris, and then make a final call on something. Once you finally find a solution that works for those, that’s really satisfying.

15:06 CR: And you mentioned briefly earlier how your team interacts with other teams at HQ, and I think I would expect especially like the engineering team or the IT teams when you have a bug or something like that, and it must be really important to have really good relationships with folks around the company, and I think that’s one of the things that’s special about HQ, especially when we’re all actually at the office together in non-pandemic times, when there is this culture where everybody is intermingling and you have an opportunity to pretty quickly get an answer for something or at least know who the right person is, as opposed to if we were some massive conglomerate where I mean you have to go through a phone tree and try… Or an email tree and figure out who is the person that you need to talk to about a certain thing.

15:54 Emily: That’s what’s been so great. And especially like when I was the Guest Experience Coordinator, I got to touch a lot of different departments and get to chat with a lot of different people, and I’ve definitely been able to kind of leverage that into knowing like who can I ask about this issue and then just feel comfortable asking ’cause everyone’s so nice.

[chuckle]

16:17 CR: Let’s talk about social media a little bit, because that’s a huge part of what the CE team does.

16:23 Andrew: I think first and foremost, it’s to raise awareness about what’s happening, either news about the company, fun entertaining blogs coming from the marketing team. We may come up with fun entertaining blog ideas, but that’s just one part of our social media. I think the majority of our social media is now starting to go more towards community-generated content. If you go over to our Instagram, every single image that we use has been created by a geocacher at some point and in some cool, crazy location, and we may put our creative touch on by adding like the words that go along with it. But we provide attribution to the person who created the image so that they can get a little bit of exposure and acknowledgement for the image that they took. We’ve been sharing them all over our social media accounts and geocaching to me, it seems like it’s so community-focused, that part of the content needs to be from the community itself.

17:32 Andrew: One of my favorite content pieces is interviews. I love interviewing cache writers or other people within the community. So one thing I do appreciate about social media, and this isn’t coming from us necessarily, it’s actually coming from the top, is we’re not spending any money on social media. We have our social media content and it goes out and it’s not necessarily to say, “Hey, come join geocaching,” it’s, “Hey, here’s this thing, and here’s some more information about it.” We’re not necessarily trying to sell people on things on our social media, and we keep it really about the game.

18:13 Emily: Yeah, I really like how I get to interact in the comments when people comment on our Instagram posts or Twitter or Facebook, it’s really fun, it’s such a cool part of community engagement to get in there and be part of the conversation and sharing their excitement and answer their questions, and also to see the community helping each other out, especially on Facebook. It’s awesome when someone has a question and a community member just like jumps right in there with an answer. That’s just so cool to see. And I love that part of it. And then the best part about geocaching is that it’s our community who’s driving this game, who’s coming up with the content that drives the game. So the fact that we can highlight our community’s creativity on our Instagram, share it, Twitter, Facebook, and I get to see their reaction. That’s like the coolest part of the job.

19:13 CR: How do you guys go about finding these great stories or images or what have you? What… Is it just hashtags and things like that or are there other investigative techniques that you have for trying to find the stuff that you would like to amplify to the rest of the community?

19:31 Andrew: Emily, you have some creative techniques.

19:34 Emily: I do. So Instagram, I usually use hashtags. So I’ll do a search for certain hashtags and then just start scrolling through what comes up to see anything that’s really eye-catching or super interesting or creative. Another thing I’ve used is pictures off geocaching.com, when people actually attach a photo to their blog. So a lot of times what I’ll do is I’ll do a search for someone’s public list of like really cool geocaches that they’ve found or certain theme geocaches and I’ll just take a look at their public list. And I’ll… You know, sometimes people write really cool, helpful captions about what they liked about that geocache. And so, I found a lot of good content off of that. So I really enjoy that. And then, just meeting people too out in the community, ’cause you get to hear about like maybe the stuff that they’re creating, like a really cool blog or maybe they have a really cool Instagram page. And so, just having those conversations as well.

20:40 CR: One thing I really enjoy that you all do is at most of our company meetings, which happen monthly, you’ll come up with a community story to share with the rest of the company. Are there any that… You don’t have to remember specifics, but is there anything that comes to mind from those? Maybe something, a favorite story or a favorite topic that has come up that you’ve in turn shared with the rest of the lackeys during those monthly meetings that we have?

21:11 Andrew: Yeah. I can think of one and I’ll try to keep it vague, even though we highlighted it on the blog. But there was this one cacher that really stood out to me and he had one of those stories where you hear it, you read it, and then you just kinda have to sit back and appreciate it and reflect. So this individual is bound to a wheelchair and he loves geocaching and he caches… He’s found thousands of geocaches, but there was a particular kind of cache he’s never found and that is a tree cache, a T5 and there’s a limitation for him, but actually, he thought creatively, contacted another local cacher and they devised a plan to get him into the tree, safely, so that he could actually log the cache and he didn’t ever have to leave his wheelchair. And that’s just like a beautiful story of his ambition and the community of geocaching coming together for a common goal.

22:14 CR: Yeah. That’s awesome. And Emily, is there anything that comes to your mind?

22:18 Emily: Yeah. I know that we shared in our company meeting, the Italian geocacher community put together a really awesome video during the earlier days of the pandemic as a way for them to stay connected as a community when they couldn’t get outside and geocache. So it was cool to see those bonds with their community and how they’re staying in touch and staying connected to the game.

22:41 CR: Kind of getting into your own geocaching for each of you, are there… Andrew, I’ll start with you, are there memories that are special for you from your time in the community or your time out trying to find geocaches?

23:00 Andrew: Yeah. I think, for me, the way that I geocache is usually I’ll have an outing, I’ll be on vacation, and I’ll find a couple. But the thing that stood out to me the most was last summer. Last summer, I had the opportunity to go to the Lost in MV Mega in Northern Germany and my experience up there wasn’t too consolidated in actual geocaching. Of course, I found a few, because we were also doing mystery at the museum through all of Europe. But I had the opportunity to talk to so many German geocachers and I learned that the German geocaching community, they go around to all the big Megas and they just catch up with their geocaching friends. And so I felt this great sense of community and there was a lot of moments where I’d get a tap on my shoulder and I’d be shown something really cool or “Hey, I wanna introduce you to my friend who caches and they’ve been to New York,” ’cause I’m from New York and that’s always a big thing.

24:00 Andrew: And so, I really appreciated getting to know everyone at this event and it felt like I was making personal connections. I also got to ride an army tank. [chuckle] The event was hosted on a military base and one of the organizers, Christian, who I had been communicating with the most, he tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Hey, you wanna ride on this?” And I couldn’t say no. And the fact that geocaching brought me there, I feel very proud about having that opportunity and being able to be exposed to these people and for them to show me their area in Northern Germany.

24:35 Emily: It was similar for me in that my most… My favorite geocaching memory was early in the year, I got to go to Texas for the Texas Challenge Mega, which is awesome because I’m a native Texan. So it was awesome to meet Texas geocachers. So the challenge part was awesome, because I got to go around caching with the team and we really challenged ourselves. Like, I got into a tree to find a cache for the first time ever. So that was like just milestones in my caching career. But the best part was, in the afternoon, my dad actually came to the Mega as well. And a couple of local cachers were like, “Hey, do you guys wanna go geocaching with us?” And my dad was like, “Of course!” So the four of us got in a car and they took us around to some of the really cool caches in the area and we just had the best time. We had so much fun and we had just met 24 hours prior. [chuckle] It was great getting to talk to them, hear about why they got into geocaching. And then also, we all shared stories about how much geocaching has…

25:48 Emily: It sounds dramatic, but changed our lives and how it’s helped us through maybe some difficult times in our lives, having that to look forward to and that to do. So that was a huge moment for me just to have so much fun and then get to realize this is why we do what we do. This is why we’re engaging with the community. This is why we’re so passionate about developing connections in the community.

26:14 CR: Yeah. It’s… Listening to both of you tell those stories, it just reminds me of… It’s one of the great things about working at HQ, is you will almost inevitably hear each lackey have a story like that, about you’re in an event, you meet somebody in the community and before you know it, [chuckle] something happens that you never thought was going to happen when you got up that morning.

26:39 Emily: No. [laughter]

26:39 Andrew: Yeah. So true.

26:43 CR: I remember being in Germany a couple years ago and getting up thinking I was just gonna go find a couple caches. And before I knew it, I had been in Italy and Switzerland [laughter] and it wasn’t midnight yet. And that wasn’t what I thought was going to happen when I woke up that day. And hearing you guys tell those stories, it’s really neat.

27:09 Emily: Yeah. It’s so fun to look back on those memories and just look forward to, in the future, having more experiences like that. It really gives you the motivation to wanna get to know even more of our community and hear even more of those stories.

27:25 CR: Yeah. I would think that the CE team, because you get to be up close with all of these stories and getting to, maybe, interview people and write stories, that you would just be constantly getting new ideas for things that you might wanna try to do in the future for yourselves.

27:44 Andrew: Oh, you betcha. [chuckle] Emily, have you made any travel plans based off of stuff you found on geocaching or on the job?

27:55 Emily: Yeah. One of our co-workers, [27:56] __, he published a adventure lab up in Port Gamble, which is up near the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. And I’ve been in Washington five years, but I’ve never been to that part of Washington. So I found myself up in the general area visiting a friend. And I was like, “You know what? I think I’m gonna go to Port Gamble and do Jeff’s Adventure Lab.” So, I did. I went to Port Gamble. I walked around. It was like a 10-stage adventure lab. It was just a really peaceful, quiet day. I was, pretty much, the only person out and about. So, it was very socially distanced and they take you around and you got to learn so much cool history about this old town, old lumber town. And yeah, I had a great day and it got me to Port Gamble.

28:52 CR: Well, I don’t wanna keep you all from coming up with more community stories and answering those emails and those questions, so I’ll let you go. But for anybody that doesn’t know the handles or the places, we’ll make sure to put these on the podcast page, but could you just run through those real quick, Andrew?

29:10 Andrew: Yeah. If you search just geocaching on Facebook, we’ll pop up. You’ll see our official logo. The same thing on Instagram, we’re just geocaching. On Twitter, we are gogeocaching, @gogeocache.

29:27 CR: That was Andrew and Emily from the CE team at Geocaching HQ. Hope you enjoyed that conversation. If you have something that you would like to hear us talk about here on the podcast, please send us an email. The address is podcast@geocaching.com. That is podcast@geocaching.com. Always love to hear your suggestions and any feedback that you might have. Until then, for me and for Andrew and for Emily and for everybody at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.