The committee have been discussing for quite a while now, how we go about making the club bigger and better. Over the last few years we have seen a number of new initiatives that have helped recruit new members to the club, culminating this year with the biggest influx for many years, 13 new members. There are a number of important factors that have changed the recruitment fortunes this year and to further build on this success we would like to let our members know what we would like to put in place commencing with the 2012 season.
- We want to offer training for raw beginners. We know we turn away quite a lot of enquiries because we don’t do this.
- We want to significantly expand the hire scheme to bring more new members into the club
- We want to have an open day which is genuinely open to the public so that they can come down to the club and see what we offer.
- And very importantly we want to embark on a programme of local advertising to make sure we let people know about our club and the activities we will be offering.
We also want to be doing more of what has become commonplace in the last few years, trips, club nights, training days, demo days, socials etc, aimed specifically at our existing members, because we know we have to work hard to keep all our members interested in staying.
Our aim is to get membership up to around the 100 mark, which we estimate will be necessary to make the club financially secure in the long term taking into account the likely rent increase for the use of both lakes.
We will likely be seeking funding help from the RYA and/or other sports bodies to help get these plans underway and to that end we have produced a written plan which can be downloaded here.
A number of long serving members of the committee will be standing down at the next AGM and coupled with the extra work involved in implementing the new plans, we need new people to help us.
So if you could spare a few hours a month either as a volunteer, or be prepared to join the committee either as an officer or ordinary member, please get in touch.
All sorts of help will be very much appreciated, we do anticipate quite an exciting year. Please don’t wait until the AGM to let us know that you want to help, we do need to start putting the plans into action soon.