SOA Community Conversations Programme for 2025 – and sign up now for the first one, on Communications & Marketing

A vital part of SOA’s function is bringing people together across the Scottish orienteering community, and one means of doing this through a series of monthly online evening sessions open to all members.  We’re pleased to be running another programme of these in 2025. You can sign up now for the first session, to be held on Monday 6 January, with a focus on communications and marketing.

The Community Conversations programme has been developed to provide opportunities across the year for orienteers to share experiences and ideas around different themes of interest to us all.  As well as supporting valuable networking and discussion, these sessions are also a valuable means for SOA to hear views and ideas from across the membership on a regular basis, to help steer its delivery work and onwards development. 

Each month’s online session will have a different theme, and will be hosted by SOA staff, Board members and central volunteers with particular interests in the subject matter.  The sessions will be highly interactive with the focus on forward-looking conversation to share good ideas and help shape practical action, whether locally or by SOA in providing support to clubs.

The online sessions will be held usually on the first Monday of the month, 7.30-8.30pm and the provisional programme is below:

January’s Conversation: Communications & Marketing  – Monday 6 January 7.30-8.30pm

The first in the monthly online Community Conversations series will be on the theme of communications and marketing and anyone with any interest is encouraged to come along.  This will be a great opportunity to share experience, and discuss successes, challenges, and ideas for practical support that SOA could usefully provide for clubs.  You might be interested from a perspective of communicating effectively with your club’s members, or perhaps from an external perspective, working to reach and engage new audiences, to inspire them to take up orienteering. Perhaps you’ve come across some great tools that have helped achieve positive results, or have gained some valuable learning from things you’ve tried that would be of interest to others in clubs elsewhere.

Katherine Ivory,  SOA’s Marketing & Communications director, will outline thinking around SOA activity on this theme in the coming year, as we enter the new four year strategy period, and the discussion will be a chance to follow up on ideas raised during the Clubs listening exercise undertaken by Nikki Howard (SOA Chief operating Officer) in summer 2024 to support the development of the new strategy and implementation plans. There will also be contributions from the staff team who have been developing ideas around support and resources.

To sign up, please register with the email address you will be using on the night by completing this sign up form by 5th January 2025 .

A link will be sent out to participants nearer the time.

For any queries on these sessions, contact nikki@scottish-orienteering.org.  For anything around marketing and communications, including any particular discussion points you’d like to raise for this community conversation, you can contact Katherine via marketing@scottish-orienteering.org.