Members should be the lifeblood of a club, but from our research, there are challenges for today’s clubs:
- An aging and less-active membership
- It’s a struggle to attract and retain new members
- Amateurs are perhaps less loyal to their local club these days
- There’s not enough people in the club to “do stuff”
Thoughts from the RSGB
At the 2017 Convention, the then RSGB President, Nick Henwood, have a presentation called “Breaking The Mould”. This is a must-watch for every club:
What can your club do?
- Ask your members what they want – You can do this by asking club members informally, but you get better results from either an online or a paper survey
- Support your enthusiastic members to try their ideas – If someone’s got an idea… let them try it. It may work, or it may not!
- Are you doing training (even something minimal using online training)? If not, you should be! See our How to start running training section for ideas on how to get started with training at your club
- How are you helping your new members to develop new skills and stay interested?
- Find out what other clubs in your area are doing well – can you adopt some of those ideas, or work with other clubs to pool resources?
- Consider a sub-group within your club – perhaps you have people interested in field days, contesting or construction? Set something up so that like-minded individuals can group together
We’ll be fleshing this page out more shortly.
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