Community Conversations Follow-Up: Communications & Marketing
A big thank you to everyone who participated in our first monthly online Community Conversation of the year, held earlier this week on the topic of Communications & Marketing.
A vital part of SOA’s function is to bring together people from across the Scottish orienteering community, and these monthly sessions aim to provide regular opportunities for sharing experiences and discussing successes, challenges, and ideas. Each session has a different focus but with the common goal of exploring things clubs are doing or would like to do to develop and promote orienteering, as well as ideas for practical things that SOA could do to support clubs, particularly as we are now embarking on the new four year strategy period Looking to the Future – the new four-year strategy for Scottish Orienteering 2025-2029
Communications Session – Discussion Themes
The January event brought together members from clubs across Scotland to discuss communications approaches and needs, whether internal to the orienteering community to reach members effectively (at both SOA and club levels), or external to engage new audiences and inspire them to try orienteering.
Key topics included ways of using social media most effectively, and strategies for attracting new members through targeted marketing campaigns. We all have a strong shared purpose to boost engagement, at both club and national levels. Understanding the target audience is core to this, and different approaches will likely be needed, e.g., to ensure relatable images are used, and that the most relevant communications channels are used.
Some Social Media Take-Aways
We had a broad ranging conversation around tools and how to use them, with some of the points captured below.
Software tools such as Canva are very easy to use by anyone (for free) to make engaging flyers, posters and social media products. However, such tools won’t alas generate the actual content, so there needs to be adequate capacity to develop impactful messaging for the intended audiences. SOA can help in providing shareable content for clubs to adapt and use easily.
Facebook and Instagram are now the main focus for most clubs, although some continue to find X / Twitter useful, particularly for engaging with the education sector. Instagram tends to be a better way for reaching younger demographics (EUOC is a particularly active club here), with Facebook typically having an older audience profile. The Meta Business Suite includes a tool to post content simultaneously to both Facebook and Instagram which helps make things more efficient.
Quite a few clubs have closed Facebook groups for their members (reflecting age profiles), with club Whatsapp groups also featuring. Clearly no single platform will reach everyone – and of course a significant proportion of members aren’t active on social media at all, with email as a preferred channel.
It’s well worth having a look at the insights available from Meta Business Suite, e.g., to explore the age profile of followers of a particular page, or how successful different posts have been in getting views and engagement (likes and shares). Trends in this insight data can help with gauging the success of development work around communication.
Building audiences takes time but investment is identifying relevant audiences and engaging with them (around their content, not just our own, to build a relationship) should pay off, e.g., with running groups or community organisations that are popular in local areas as sources of what-so type information for families.
Resources such as blank templates for events publicity social-media posts or posts can help a lot where there is limited capacity. Using a nice image of the area where a come-and-try-it event is going to be held can entice newcomers along, whether or not there is a visual link to orienteering (such as a kite or runners with maps). However, ‘people like people’ – and so do social media algorithms – so ideally also have relatable images for the audience you are trying to reach (families / adult runners / club orienteers etc).
Beyond Social Media
There are of course many different modes of communication and old-school printed means can have considerable impact still, e.g., event posters on community noticeboards and around venues (subject to permissions of course) to attract newcomers from the local area.
As well as general outreach via social media, having a good post-event process with individual newcomers is really important. Clubs typically capture emails (with consents to use) from event participants and then have a friendly club member use these to follow up to encourage further participation in particular opportunities that might be coming up. Some clubs use these contacts for building up external email circulation lists too.
Explaining orienteering and what’s involved for different courses is ever a challenge. Working towards consistency in terminology across clubs would help quite a bit to avoid confusion for example – for example, consistently referring to Red rather than ‘Long Orange’ courses (and note that Red is being offered as a course option for this year’s Scottish 6 Days. Colour labels are opaque for newcomers; some clubs use alternative terms such as ‘short easy’, ‘long easy’ etc. Come-and-Try-It publicity should also make clear what participants will experience in terms of what support will be on offer; demystifying is really important to get people along to open events as opposed to taking taster sessions to them (e.g., as a session put on for a running club or youth group).
Websites have of course been a core communications tool for some years now, but the rise of social media raises questions about their purpose. Some clubs are finding that their website is mostly used for club management (as a repository for information and resources) rather than for marketing. Whilst a good ‘shop front’ is desirable for those who do visit it, there is a management overhead in keeping it up-to-date and this needs commitment.
A wide range of tools now exists for communication, whether for general public outreach or within a particular community such as a club. As well as Whatsapp, ‘Spond’ is an example of an app used by quite a few running clubs to manage participation in activities and events. There was interest in a future session to look at options for club management tools, as well as aspects of these such as data privacy, particularly where juniors might access them too. Another topic suggested for a future Scottish Orienteering Community session was entry systems.
Next Steps
SOA will be continuing to develop its own approach to communication, both internally with the Scottish Orienteering community as well as more broadly to raise the profile of our sport. The coming year will see the implementation of a more strategic framework with a content calendar to help with forward planning across a range of themes (events, other news, wider things going on of relevance to orienteering and vice versa). As noted above, whilst online tools have many positives, old-school approaches do too, particularly in-person opportunities to share knowledge, experience and perspectives. We plan to increase the visibility of the Board, staff and core volunteers and interaction with the wider Scottish orienteering community, with stalls at key events, so do look out for these.We are also considering setting up a network for club Comms & Marketing leads, to help continue dialogue around developing approaches and share learning. If you’d like to be involved, please do get in touch with Katherine Ivory, SOA’s Marketing & Comms Director, via marketing@scottish-orienteering.org.
Further Development Opportunities and ResourcesIn addition to SOA support, British Orienteering offers a range of things for clubs and members. In particular, its 2025 online Development Conference underway, including a session on marketing held on Mon 13th January, for which a recording will be available via their Youtube site. Sign up for Development Conference webinars or find the link to those you have missed Development Conferences via the British Orienteering website. There is lots else of general interest on the programme too.
The British Orienteering website also holds a host of other useful resources for members and clubs to use. Sign in with your BOF login, then go to the Club & Membership Toolkit, to find resources for Campaigns, Promoting Your Club, and Digital Content. There is a gallery of orienteering images for re-use in publicity work (ensure photo credits are added) as well as templates for social media card, flyers etc.. British Orienteering has also just launched a new campaign – Elevate your Fitness campaign – which is targeted on those with New Year’s Resolutions to get more active, and there is a brand new set of resources for re-use by clubs.
The International Orienteering Foundation (IOF) is another source of useful support, via its Global Development Webinars | International Orienteering Federation. Information about webinars in 2025 will be published soon.
FUTURE COMMUNITY CONVERSATIONS
We’re keen to keep building collaboration across clubs and the Community Conversations series is an important way of doing this. Everyone is welcome to attend any and all sessions so please do participate where you can. Information on each monthly event will be posted in advance on the SOA website with a sign-up link. The next SOA Community Conversation will be on Mon 3 February, and the theme of Development and Recruiting Newcomers. Register here. A Zoom link will be sent out to participants nearer the time. For any queries on these sessions, contact nikki@scottish-orienteering.org.