ORIENTEERING FOUNDATION

CLYDE club development report

Last year we made an award to CLYDE to help fund a club development officer role (see award). Here we bring you some highlights as they move through that first year of this role.

The club has initially recruited two club development officers - Robin Matthews who is dealing with the membership, and Ruari Cottier covering come-and-try-its and coaching.

They put on a couple of primary school taster events in June at Strathblane Primary School (thanks to Dan with Kirsty and Robin) and Armitage Primary School, Helensburgh (thanks to Lizzy).

They then planned a series of Come and Try It event pilots on consecutive weeks in July at Balloch and Mugdock country parks, with separate groups for 8-12 year olds in the morning, and 12+ year olds in the afternoon. These have met with mixed success. One date ended up being cancelled due to low sign-ups, but a couple of the others each saw at least half a dozen families attending. Some challenges faced included the on-the-day park rangers not really aware of what CLYDE were doing, depsite permissions being arranged in advance; other conflicting events being on at the same time; and not having enough time in advance to advertise. However, any new project is always going to be hard (other CDOs that have been going for years also had some bumpy first few months), and CLYDE have got plenty of learning from what works and what doesn't.

Going forwards they have plenty more plans including more CATIs and caoching days, developing maps, learning about tools like Condes, learning from about how to attract membership, and reflecting that in the website, with posters, publicity and facebook advertising. We wish them continued success as they move forwards.

Last updated: Fri 4 Oct 2024