Tag: community conversations

With the busy January and February calendar with British Orienteering Development Conference, it has been decided to focus the SOA Community Conversations between March and December in 2026.

The idea of Community Conversation sessions is to create a space to bring members together to share experiences, successes, challenges and ideas around particular themes. They are open discussions and everyone is very welcome to come along, and contribute thoughts, practice and learning from your experience.

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 and recruiting newcomers. Community Conversations are open discussions so provide a great platform to see how other clubs work with newcomers and what learnings could potentially be taken forward into your own club.

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

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.