How do we encourage people to continue orienteering?

An overview of the March Community Conversation!

Community conversations bring members together each month to share experiences, successes, challenges and ideas on an allocated topic. This month’s conversation focused on development, funnelling newcomers into becoming regular orienteers and retaining members. Community Conversations are open discussions so provide a great platform to see how other clubs work with their members and what learnings could potentially be taken forward into your own club.

Mary Williams, the SOA Development Director, opened the discussion and introduced our special guest from Lakeland Orienteering Club, Carol McNeill. Carol provided an overview of the work their development officer, Kath Savage, has been doing. Further details on this are later in the article, as well as some materials that LOC have been using. The other key discussion topics were the newcomer experience, adult and junior progression including red courses and the STAR award, and opportunities for socialising.

Below is an overview of the key outputs of the most recent discussion from a variety of themes.

Key takeaway points:

• Red courses and adult progression
  • Including red courses provides longer courses for adults as well as separating them out from competing against juniors on the orange course.
  • Provide short practice loops (~1km) that are of a harder difficulty for newcomers to try if they are interested in progressing their skills. This allows them to be challenged without needing them to commit to a full length TD4 or TD5 course and can be part of the offer at local events alongside the usual colour coded courses.
• Pay-to-play
  • People are happy to pay for hobbies so asking for payment in advance of a series of sessions is expected and acceptable in the eyes of most people.
• Junior progression – STAR award, badges
  • The SOA STAR Award can be a positive tool for successfully keeping juniors coming back whilst also helping them to progress their skills without focussing on event results.
• Newcomer experience – demystifying and jargon-busting
  • Orienteering is made to be very complex! Putting effort into helping newcomers understand jargon and acronyms can go a long way in making them feel welcome and make them want to keep coming back.
  • Attempting to reduce the use of jargon when advertising the sport makes it much more accessible.
• Opportunities for socialising
  • Providing a situation that encourages socialising at or after an event helps create a positive club environment. This is good for your established members as well as helping newcomers feel more comfortable and welcomed.
• Retaining newcomers at membership renewals 
  • This was highlighted as an issue for some clubs. Tips to encourage renewals are highlighting the exciting things your club has coming up in the following year and also reaching out personally to people you haven’t seen for a while. Don’t be afraid to do this – quite often people simply forget!

Further detail on the discussions can be found in the rest of the article as well as an update on the SOA plans around development work. Thank you to all that contributed insights and experiences from their clubs: BASOC, CLYDE, EckO, ESOC, FVO,  INT, INVOC, KFO, MOR, RR, SOLWAY. A big thank you also to the contribution from Carol McNeill on the development work being done by Lakeland Orienteering Club.

SOA Development Next Steps

SOA will be continuing to grow in its own approach to development, both internally within the Scottish Orienteering community as well as more broadly to raise the profile of our sport. The coming year will see more focus on work within schools to increase the general awareness of orienteering as a sport across Scotland. Teachers will be trained up so that they can provide orienteering sessions within their school and have a knowledge of how this can be implemented across a range of curriculum topics. With SOA focussing on children within schools, we will be using this year’s development funding to encourage clubs to focus on recruitment of young adults as this is where the current demographic of the sport is lacking. If you have any queries related to development, then get in touch with our two development officers Louise and Heidi on louise@scottish-orienteering.org or heidi@scottish-orienteering.org respectively.

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 7th April, with the theme of Club Coaching and Support for Development.  Register here. A Zoom link will be sent out to participants nearer the time. It is currently being discussed how the Community Conversations series can be made more visible with a streamlined way for people to find information – if you have any suggestions please get in touch. For any other queries on these sessions, contact nikki@scottish-orienteering.org

Between Community Conversations, we recommend looking at British Orienteering Development Conference Resources. SOAs development director Mary Williams particularly recommends the ‘soft skills for effective coaching’ and ‘increasing the impact of a CATI’ webinars. 

Growing a club – the Lakeland OC Experience

LOC have increased their membership by over 100 in the last 3 years, largely thanks to work undertaken by their Club Development Officer. As a club, they have been targeting families which has also worked in attracting the parents that fit into the 20-40 year age group. They decided to offer free memberships to juniors as well as free entry to their family fun events. Their schools league provided a good progression for the juniors and they are planning an upcoming Saturday series as another step up. These will follow the same timings as the fun family events to remain consistent and happen once a month to reduce workload on their volunteers. There will also be points available for school children, with an overall league and trophy for the winning school. Courses available will be yellow, orange and a score with some more technical controls. LOC have found lots of success in advertising their events on social media. Head over to their website to see the work they have been doing and also read the report produced following the first year of their families project.

Red Courses and Adult Progression 

Red courses are useful for engaging with adult beginners and people coming from a running background into the sport. RR have recently been targeting parkrunners and have been attracting them to their events. So much so they have switched to having local events on Sundays to avoid clashing. At ELOs most recent local event, 10 out of the 97 were on the red course. INT have held a few parkrun taster events and, although it was agreed that these increase awareness of orienteering, the jury is still out if these bring people along to the events and have a positive effect on membership. LOC had found initiatives involving parkrunners unsuccessful however RR were the opposite.

Building up from TD3 was highlighted as a challenge for adult beginners, particularly for clubs who didn’t have the capacity for weekly activities. KFO had used pairs to help newcomers develop their skills. EckO have been setting out short loops of TD4 and TD5 courses at events so people can try a harder level of course without committing to doing the full course. This could be established as a standard part of the offer at local events, using controls from the standard colour coded courses or using exercises from training held before the event. SEDS (Scottish Elite Development Squad) is also going to be opening up to TD3-4 athletes to give more opportunity for adult training.

There was a common theme that often adult newcomers struggle to compete for the attention of coaches as so much time is given to juniors. BASOC hosted a successful online ‘geeking’ session before the CompassSport heats which they found provided a great opportunity for people to look at the map together but also discuss the event details and arrangements.

Pay-to-Play

The research undertaken by Barodeur highlights that people nowadays are happy to pay money to take part in their hobbies. FVO have trialled both making participants pay a small fee as well as offering them for free. Mary also highlighted the English clubs SYO and SBOC that have charged a fee for a series of events and made this payable in advance.

Junior progression

There are many ways of keeping juniors engaged, such as record cards, badges and the SOA STAR Award which is aimed at skills development rather than event results. The Award and Incentive Schemes page on the SOA website gives further explanation, as well as links to resources and other incentive schemes.

FVO currently use the STAR award and have found it very useful in successfully retaining a lot of their juniors. They require that at Levels 1 and 2 the parents are also in attendance and this allows them to join in and also receive some coaching. Once at Level 3, the juniors are more independent and the parents are able to focus on their own skills improvement. FVO coaches have been implementing short 30-45 minute coaching sessions before events which involve lots of very short games and activities that work well with the short attention span of young children.

Jargon Busting – Newcomer Experience

Another outcome of the Barodeur research was that orienteering is a very complicated sport to newcomers with a lot of jargon and acronyms. Finlo Cottier from ECKO is very aware of this, and has been ensuring that newcomers are not left in the dark.. For example, when event details are posted on their club WhatsApp, he will follow up with a full explanation of anything that might be unknown. Another part of their newcomer experience involves helping to interpret the sport in any other way necessary. For example, where to buy long orienteering socks and compasses and what people mean when they talk about ‘SIAC’ or ‘SOLs’.

On the SOA website, there is a list of common jargon along with explanations that you might find useful. We’re aware it is in need of an update and would welcome any suggestions as to jargon that could be added.

There is also a list of jargon on the British Orienteering website. https://www.britishorienteering.org.uk/orienteering_jargon

Opportunities for socialising

Opportunities to socialise and meet other orienteers is important to help keep people involved in the sport. MOR have been having pop up cafes at their local events encouraging people to hang around after their run. ESOC have been having monthly socials based around an easy to organise activity such as postbox-O followed by a pub trip. INVOC have also been offering hot drinks and snacks after their training to encourage people to stay and chat. Similarly, ELO had free hot chocolate and cake on offer at the Scottish Night Champs last month that successfully got people hanging round and socialising even in the dark and cold!

Retaining Newcomers at Membership Renewals 

Each year, potential orienteers and future volunteers are lost at membership renewal time as demonstrated by the Baroudeur funnel. KFO having grown their membership over the past 4 year and are now looking to develop the skills of their membership, share some top tips around membership renewal to make sure people continue in the sport:

• Send out a survey highlighting next years club activities a few days before membership renewals are due
• Tell people about what is happening in the club post membership renewals
• People just forget- don’t be afraid to remind people to renew their membership
• KFO have found asking those who haven’t been at events/activities in a while if they would like to go around a course in a pair with a coach a good way of re-engaging people and getting them to renew