Discussion: Club Membership

What are other clubs doing to attract new participants to the sport and new members to your clubs?

ROC is a very active organization, and from what I've seen, we do:
- frequent events; Club events almost every other week with 3 Ski-Os during the winter.
- publicity; The local paper often includes the events in calenders, and puts top 3 results per course in next day's sports section.
- youth; Have partnered with some schools within the school and extended free participation to a nearby meet afterwards.
- variety; In the same way that we wouldn't want the same course week after week, the events change from sprints to Night-O to Score-O to regular to rogaine to goat to weekday evening (over the summer) instead of weekends. White is available at pretty much every event.
- newsletter; Distributed to club members and available to newcomers at the meets. Includes writeups, training help, schedules, etc.
- scouts; partnering with some scout organizations for events.
- variety; (again) The club has a good number of mapped areas and can rotate around N/S/E/W of the city and does not have to return to any one park that often.
- happy orienteers; I once was a newbie, and all of the people I have ever met through the club have been cheerful, helpful, and sociable. (who would want to run around the woods with a bunch of grumps...-)
- policy; Can't recite them all here, but from my view, the group's policies are member friendly.

the group's policies are member friendly

Hard to imagine what kind of a group would put together any other sort of policies.

> Hard to imagine what kind of a group would put together any other sort of policies.

Maybe we haven't been involved with the same organizations - there are some that I've experienced that continue to exist _in spite_ of their policies...-)

I think there is member neutral, and then there are those groups that go out of their way to make you feel welcome and glad to be a part of - and that makes a difference.

Club events almost every other week with 3 Ski-Os during the winter

How many different members do you have to put on your "frequent events"? Do some/many members organize more than one event per year?

How big is the Rochester area (what size population are you drawing from)? How did you convince the newspaper to print your information (the Albany paper is very reluctant to print orienteering schedules/results)? How many different mapped areas do you have?

What kind of events do you hold in city parks (do you use control markers or some other variation)?

I started orienteering a few years ago, but only this past spring did I realize we have a great local organization;-)

you can see more directly at http://roc.us.orienteering.org

I can see from the volunteer board that we have 22 events scheduled for the year, with 12-14 volunteers needed for each.

[funky permission issue with AP here... sorry for the disconnect...]

Yes - people will volunteer for more than one event through the year.
Volunteer responsibilities are split up to generally allow you to volunteer and compete.

(and volunteers don't have to pay the meet fee)

We have a very effective volunteer coordinator;-)

Plus - by reaching this level of events, people are always thinking about the club. Number of starters for the last 4 events - 56, 61, (in April) 50, 90 (in May).

Note - the club will do an A-meet / large Rogaine once every 2 or three years, but members will travel to other areas for A-meets.

The Rochester area population (and you have to count all the nearby counties) is greater than 1.1 million. We often pull competitors from both the Buffalo and Syracuse areas.

The newspaper is a long-standing coup and I don't have the details - we had an in at the paper and as long as we call the same day as an event, they put the results in. The announcements are actually less regular...

I count 16 advertised parks and I think we have a couple locations that might be very irregularly used that are not on the list. Some of the parks are large enough to have events on opposite sides with very little overlap. Four of the parks have permanent courses (generally courtesy of a boy scout working on an eagle project).

And not all events are full - We usually have W/Y/O. G and R less often (some parks just don't have the terrain or space to offer them), and Brown or Blue seldom. But - we let the experienced people run any and all so that they get a better workout. (orange first, then a sprint, then the yellow...) Letchworth provides a good challenge.

We use the two city parks for sprints, score-O, night-O (score-O format), and shorter courses (like on the national orienteering day). We use our standard controls.

Now if I could only find more A meets within 200 miles of us...-)

Oh hey - you can't use the word c h u n k e d on the board, it fails with an unnamed error.I was using it in reference to splitting up the duties of the volunteers above... I suppose it is offensive somewhere...

Cascade OC started using vouchers for free meets as a thank-you to meet helpers a few years back. Not sure if they're still doing it, but I remember thinking that was a nice way to recognize those who repeatedly put in the time and effort to make things happen. Definitely a member-friendly move.

Another thought is to get an "in" with the local adventure racing community - a lot of them are looking to improve their navigation skills and will come to B meets. Cascade offers a navigation-focused adventure race that draws not only orienteers, but some of the local weekend warriors. I think that is also true for their Street Scramble series, although I'm not sure whether there is crossover between those who go for the urban score-o format and those who orienteer in the woods. We also saw some adventure racers come out for a late fall urban rogaine that we held for CSU and seemed interested in attending some of the local meets...but again, we've moved and I'm not sure how that played out.

And then there's the West Point method...I propagandize all my classes in the spring after they've started doing the orienteering intramural. We'll see if I convinced anyone to try out for the team when August rolls around...and meanwhile, the cadets recruit freshmen and sophomores during "club night." I'm sure "normal" colleges have these, too...maybe a table at the local college might bring in some new blood?

For comparison, in Bendigo Australia.

We run about 30 events each year in bush (forest). 28 of these are 'local'. There are also between 4 and 8 street orienteering events held during summer evenings when the weather is too hot to run forest events.

For local events the 'one person and a car boot' rule applies. If it takes more than one dedicated organiser, or it requires more gear than one car can handle, then the event needs to be simplified. The organiser is the course setter as well. It takes a day out of your life. Of course, other club members pitch in with tasks like recording times and collecting controls. There is also an unwritten rule that sometimes things go wrong and no-one will complain. During 15 years in the club, I can't remember that last rule being broken. New organisers are aftern given a 'buddy' assistant who knows the ropes. That makes for a very supportive environment for new course setters and organisers.

We get between 25 and 75 at our 'local' events.

Most volunteers organise one or two events a year.

The population of the town is about 70,000. We have about 60-70 active members who turn up to events regularly. There is a core of about 20 who keep the club running, and a group of about 5-10 hard cases who go to everything. The membership of these last two groups interchanges depending upon the year, competing interests and commitments, and the export of younger club members to education elsewhere..

There are normally 2 or 3 larger events which require many more people. State Series, national events, an occasional rogaine. Some events are very large. The World Masters was in the Bendigo region in 2002. That took the whole state to organise. But the health of the sport depends on the success of the small events.

The club has 27 mapped forest areas. Most of our maps are within 20 minutes drive from town centre. Most terrain is 'continental'. Gully-spur with a track network. The gully intersection to contour ratio is good. That means more decisions per bead of sweat. There are also some gold mining maps and some good granite just a little bit further out (eg Kooyoora 1985 World Champs).

The proximity of maps to town and the regularity of local events over the past 10 years has transformed the club membership. We now have many more members who would only attend local events and wouldn't consider travelling any distance to higher status events.

For our very small club here in Utah (7 events planned this year), we hooked up with a local outdoor store and got on their schedule of weeknight evening classes. Prior to the class we created a map of the area around the store, which was across the parking lot from a mall next to an interstate. As unpromising as that sounds, it turned out there was a fair bit of landscaping amongst the pavement, including a swampy pond with a boardwalk and a small patch of woods with a trail looping though it. Mapping such an urban area is a bit easier than the typical forest - most of the features stand out on an aerial photo.

We had about 20 people attend the class. I talked for 30 minutes and then sent them out on the course, which was about 2 km long. We followed this Thursday evening class with a Saturday event on our nearest map. Several people from the class showed up that Saturday and again at our latest meet which was 30 miles to the north. With a little luck and encouragement a few of these folks will become event organizers.

Whatever your strategy to attract participants, I recommend targeting families as part of it since they come with a "staff" to manage event registration, control setting and takedown, etc... The clubs I have been on have been sustained by a handful of families that are willing to organize meets themselves and lend their many hands to help out other organizers.

what I can tell you is what to AVOID DOING! my club was the first in the region, has honourous past, but is now near to the disintegration...this because of some strategic mistakes:

- future lies on the youth...and when we had a reasonable group of them (I was one of them), nobody worried about getting new ones. the result? we got adult, many left, and I'm almost the only surviver (would say the only one who's active...some others come but irregularly). this caused a stop in training proposition (we had 1 or 2 youth and was illogical to keep on).

- we missmanaged advertising campaigns. I'm marketing students (unluckily wasn't at the time :/ ), and what we did was completely wrong. Choose the wrong target (too little childs, 8-10), wrong tool (flyers were not that clear, with no real message), and didn't integrate the fliers with tangent proposals such as events, etc. We didn't choose a timetable and the effort was irregular. All of this resulted in no new member, and stupid waste of money.

- we don't have a clear leadership and separation of tasks (which doesn't mean being less friendly to each other), with a results of complete waste of time (nobody knows what to do), misunderstandings and internal fights, and no real search for solutions to the clubs' crisis.

Too sad...

I was once at a convention where someone suggested that a sign of a healthy club was when local meets have more people running beginning courses than advanced. In the US comparing White/Yellow/Orange participation to the other courses. I've found this to be a real good benchmark. I would like to grow more competitive advanced orienteers in my club, but the club itself survives on a constant stream of volunteers. If you aren't consistently bringing in new beginners, you'll run out of new volunteers at some future time.