Is traditional orienteering dying?

[andypat]

ACould SUFFOC/SOS, maybe HAVOC one day get together and get yourself an Essex/South Suffolk/A12 level D weekend orienteering league going one day? With all those juniors and a reasonable number of seniors in your area it could be at least as successful as the Kent Orienteering League for example (cost = £5/£3 = cheaper than level C's and of course EOD only. )

even cheaper still if they didnt have to pay a 20% levy!

[SeanC]

Or paying for all the other costs, map printing, paying for O kit, paying land use costs, paying to get there, cups of tea etc. In fact society should pay orienteers to go orienteering. £10 an hour maybe. £20 an hour if it's at Joydens Wood

More seriously it makes sense for BOF to support setting up new local events beyond what they do now (eg articles in Focus, some publicity help etc). Eg help clubs apply for SportEngland grants, kit loan/help with equipment, more concrete help with initial publicity, referring clubs to other volunteers who might help.

Unfortunately there's no development fund to give direct grants.

Now BOF get income from such local events they have a financial incentive to help start them up. Kent Orienteering League events generate about £50 per event, which sounds like small change, but over time it adds up. £5000 over a 10 year period.

[Red Adder]

In reply to a couple of follow-ups ..

I do understand why clubs have to charge more for certain events - the odd quid is fine, if its 66% more perhaps a short explanation on the event details wouldn't go amiss.

Sadly Havoc, SOS and SuffOC are all small clubs and can struggle to find volunteers to put on our current programs and also have land access problems - we can't go in our FC forest between March and September, similar problems with small areas with a Wildlife trust interest and cash strapped councils are increasingly seeing any organised activity as a revenue stream (would you pay an £80 access fee for a park event that could attract at most 25 people ?).

What has been disheartening is that the initiatives I have been involved with to further the sport BOF has not been supportive, in fact quite the reverse.

I started our summer series - BOF then became interested in as far it increased participation figures a smidge but then sought to tax it at a flat rate which makes them increasingly uneconomic to run. I also do a lot of schools mapping. It can help the sport in that if you get children interested they try "proper" events, then get the parents involved and the club gets the boost of another active family. But schools aren't currently on BOFs radar so they have stopped insuring club mappers on such projects and no longer help with CRBs. The message it gives to me is don't bother - not a great idea at a time with dwindling active participants and volunteers.

[SeanC]

You might be being too pessimistic on some of these points Red Adder. The Kent Orienteering league is attended mainly by DFOK and SAXONS members, both clubs have 104 ranked members combined. An A12 weekend league targetting SOS and SUFFOC (ignoring HAVOC for this example) would have 109 ranked members to aim at. KOL income is around £200-£250 per event after levies, which leaves more than enough for an £80 land access fee, especially if you can find a mix of cheap and expensive areas. Population of Essex/south Suffolk and Kent/SE london is roughly the same.

The 4 course local event format used at KOL's is more volunteer intensive than some (such as Moravian's events, or simple score events). I bet you could find a selection of cheaper areas for these even simplier events, and it's easier to find organisers for simple events and you can go back to the same area more than once in a year potentially. I'd never have believed 10 years ago that DFOK and Saxons would have the volunteer capacity to organise 23 Kent Night Cup events in addition to all the other stuff, but we do. More events = more volunteers it seems.

[Red Adder]

Kent with a population of 1.8 million is about 3x as populous as the A12 corridor (Chelmsford / Ipswich) and our comparable Summer series averages about 25 entrants raising barely £ 50 after "tax" so KOL must be generating an excellent turnout and / or be charging far more than we do.

[Paul Frost]

BOF then became interested in as far it increased participation figures a smidge but then sought to tax it at a flat rate which makes them increasingly uneconomic to run.

But don't forget that at the same time they introduced the flat £1 levy they also reduced the adult membership fee from £21.50 to £5. I'm aware that some people had a local membership option and so only saved £3 year. But the local membership wasn't sustainable at that price, it also caused so much confusion when trying to explain how to join and it complicated things if you lived on the border of different local areas or wanted to go to the JK.
The free first year just created a large churn in membership as many dropped out at the end of the year and another lot replaced them.
So something had to change.

Even though I disagree with a lot of British Orienteering policy, we do need a national governing body and it costs money to run.

People are very used to the pay-as-you-go process and seem to prefer it to signing up for a period of time. Having a high initial membership fee will be a barrier to many.

The net effect seems to be that the overall income from levies and membership is close, with a bit less being paid in total under the new system. Which means that we have paid less to go orienteering than we used to. I fully accept that there are lots of variables, but broadly speaking we have not paid more money to British Orienteering.

I suspect that the very keen orienteer that travels around is probably a bit poorer, but most of the complaints about the high fees are based on the assumption that it is putting off the casuals.
One group must effectively be subsidising another group if the overall amount hasn't changed, so which group are the winners in this, we can't all be losers?

[Red Adder]

I strongly agree with the principle of low membership fee and appropriate levies so that the more you orienteer the more you contribute. I think things weren't set up quite right last year if the levy was set at a pound when in order to have a flat budget it should have been about £ 1.30. This deficit was always going to store up trouble in later years. I also think a bad error was made in having a single rate levy. Cat D's are meant to be low-key event whilst the proponents of Cat B always claim they offer something extra - so its fair that these differences are also reflected in the levy.

For next year I would propose (admittedly without access to entry data in order to gauge the income) the following

Cat B £ 2.00
Cat C £ 1.50
Cat D £ 1.00
with juniors at 1/3rd the rate.

These are not aimed tp my personal advantage. Assuming they had been applied last year my entries would have cost £ 8 more and a similar figure is anticipated for this year. Coincidentally had these figures been in place last year I would have contributed near enough exactly £ 1.30 per event I entered.

[roadrunner]

If I remember correctly, the idea of a flat rate levy was to stop clubs from reducing the levy they paid by deliberately giving events a lower classification - though of course there's still an issue with events and activities. So if you wanted different levies for different levels of events - and I don't think it's a bad idea - then you'd need some more rigid system for defining what level an event was.

Of course, we had this back in the old days: age class courses = badge event (or higher).

[SeanC]

Red Adder. Aren't the SUFFOC summer series events midweek? We find we get less midweek too. Kent Night Cup attendance averages 32 this year (still pretty good mind you).

Put level D's on a Saturday or Sunday throughout the year and I'm confident you'd get 50+ after the series establishes itself. People have the time to travel further on the weekend. An A12 league stretching from Brentwood to Woodbridge with 3 clubs, gives a market of regular orienteers of 150 + , plus a big market of potential newcomers (including some east London types).

The A12 though, it's such a boring road. Not much you can do about that.....

[DaveK]

In fact society should pay orienteers to go orienteering. £10 an hour maybe. £20 an hour if it's at Joydens Wood

Sorry Sean, couldn't resist this - Joyden's Wood, DFOK event, was the first orienteering event I attended with my family back in 1989 - just surprised we ever went again. Couldn't just have been the brambles and horrible mud we enjoyed so much? Four of us (6 with partners) still competing fairly regularly

As to your comments on the Kent Night Cup series we run, I agree that we have been fortunate to get the volunteer support to organise so many (weekly) events but as I found out (again) last week, when you get 35 or so people turning up midweek for a bit of 'O' it makes it pretty satisfying - especially when some of these are not regular (weekend) orienteers - but 'get the buzz'.

[SeanC]

Joydens Wood, yes I guess it's got a "good path network" to keep away from the brambles.

Actually, for those that haven't been there, it's a lovely peaceful wood, quite surprising for somewhere so close to London. Just bring the steel gaters.

Gutted, only one Kent NIght Cup event to go. When do the London Park Races start?