June’s Community Conversation brought together members from across Scottish clubs to share thoughts on supporting and encouraging newcomer families. This theme follows on from the May discussion on creating welcoming environments at events. (May Community Conversation) Involving parents is usually key to retaining and developing new juniors, and supporting a balanced orienteering demographic. How can we best support parents to get involved in our sport?
April’s Community Conversation had a theme of marketing and outreach to newcomers. SOA comms & marketing Director, Katherine Ivory, started the session off with an overview of three practical tools that are being used to promote orienteering to wider audiences, leading into discussion about the new SOA leaflet for newcomers.
Event Publicity and Planning for Success
Communications work never stops, with continuous needs around sharing information and encouraging interest. Given the limited resources for this within the volunteer-driven orienteering community, what can help make things as efficient and effective as possible?
Growing participation in orienteering depends on how effectively we reach and engage new people. The April online Community Conversation (April Club Conversations sign up) will focus on practical ways through which clubs and SOA can improve marketing and outreach.
What’s SOA up to? Participants from clubs around the country found out by quizzing SOA Chair Jonathan Molloy at the first session in the 2026 Community Conversations series.
Some of you will have seen the Scottish Orienteering Impact Report for 2025 published in December last year which highlighted some of the activities which had taken place under the auspices of Scottish Orienteering via the SOA staff team as well as our clubs and members. As ever in our volunteer dependant sport, none of this would be possible without our amazing orienteering community who give so much of their time.
That said we often hear feedback that some of our members don’t know what the SOA does. Whilst we have been trying to ensure that we talk about what the SOA staff team have been doing (in the Monthly newsletter, via Club Despatches and on social media) we also wanted to provide everyone with the opportunity to come and ask any questions. So why not pop into our first Community Conversation of 2026 on Monday 23rd March with Jonathan Molloy (our SOA Board Chair) ? Sign up via this link
Last night, we held our December Community Conversation focused on safety within our sport. The meeting was led by the Scottish Orienteering Association Safety Director, Tim O’Donoghue, who shared updates regarding how safety is managed at the British Orienteering Federation (BOF) level and learnings which could be taken from incidents reported.
The 2025 series of monthly open-to-all online Community Conversations will draw to a close after the final one on 3rd December (December Community Conversation sign up form) and a big ‘thank you’ to everyone who has taken part and contributed so far. Your input and engagement have been invaluable in helping strengthen connections across clubs and with the SOA team. We would love your feedback and suggestions to ensure that the series continues to evolve in 2026 to deliver on what’s of most value to you.
The November session in the SOA’s monthly online Community Conversations series focused on the crucial topic of supporting and developing our volunteer base, including our pipeline of event officials. This is of course core to delivering on our mission for orienteering to be a thriving sport for all.
One of Scottish Orienteering’s four strategic aims (read more here) is around lifelong pathways, and a new one for Volunteers was published earlier this year (Lifetime Pathways infograms) (many thanks to Jen Leonard, FVO, for developing the original pathways graphic). This sets out clearly for everyone what the opportunities look like and how to progress.
How can SOA and clubs best work together to encourage and engage members as club volunteers, to drive positive developments for orienteering, at all levels? Some of the foundations might be around training and sharing technical information; however, a great deal is around the ‘people’ side of things.
The September session in the SOA’s monthly online Community Conversations series focused on access to orienteering areas and navigating permissions. Arranging access for orienteering is often viewed as at best a drain on clubs’ organisational resources and at worth a headache that ultimately can thwart an event from happening. So how can clubs work best with landowners and tenants, to get good outcomes all round?
Building Good Relationships with Landowners
As for pretty much everything, building relationships is key – whether with individuals where land is in private hands or with employees as representatives of statutory or charitable organisations (councils, Forestry Land Scotland, RSPB, National Trust, MoD etc). Finding out who exactly to speak with can sometimes take a bit of detective work but persevere and engage positively: we are all ambassadors for our sport. There may be other land users to build relationships with too, to achieve good outcomes. Shared use is the norm, whether with the general public or with other specific interest groups (mountain bikers, archers, clay-pigeon shooters etc).
The June session in the SOA’s monthly online Community Conversations series focused on supporting inclusion and wellbeing. The session was introduced by Ken McDonald, the SOA’s Equality, Welfare and Diversity Director, followed by open discussion around aspects of inclusion that clubs and SOA might now focus on.
Ken set the scene by outlining what we mean by inclusion and what Scottish Orienteering wants to achieve. Key to this is developing an understanding of the barriers different people may face and proactively addressing these to maximise access, increase participation across the board, and drive wider benefits around the sustainability of our sport and positive experiences for everyone. Inclusivity is part of the bedrock of the Sport for Life strategy of sportscotland (our major funder), to support a more active Scotland and public health goals as well as Scottish sporting performance.
