New PA Game Commission Website To Go Live In Mid-April

Marketing hunting in Pennsylvania

By Bob Frye

The Pennsylvania Game Commission's new website is about to go live. Its new marketing campaign will follow close behind and be focused largely here in western Pennsylvania.

The website, an addition to the existing one, is called GoHuntPa.org. It will debut in mid-April, right after the agency gives final approval to hunting and trapping seasons and bag limits for 2014-15.

The intent is to make it a streamlined version of the agency's regular website, with information only on hunting-specific topics like seasons, places to hunt, pheasant stockings and where to buy a license, said Keith Snyder, the agency's outreach and education division chief.

The marketing campaign will begin in September with a series of radio and print ads and billboards encouraging people who hunt periodically, but not every year — “fringe” hunters, Snyder called them — to come back to the sport and stay. The outreach effort will focus on the nine Pennsylvania counties with the most hunters. Allegheny leads that list by a large margin and will see much of the advertising along with Erie, Westmoreland, York, Lancaster, Butler, Cambria, Berks and Cumberland counties.

The advertising effort will continue through November, he said. There will be a heavy emphasis on deer hunting, given that the whitetail attracts more hunters than any other species in Pennsylvania.

“There is no close second,” Snyder said.

The goal of the campaign is to get the commission back to selling one million hunting licenses a year by 2018-19. It sold about 944,000 general licenses — not including specialty tags like those for muzzleloader, bear and archery hunting — in 2012. The commission hasn't hit the one million mark in licenses sold since 2004.

The cost of the marketing program is about $450,000 annually. Federal grant money covers that.

“I can hardly wait to see the results,” commissioner Dave Putnam of Centre County said.