How to keep people involved in orienteering?

[roadrunner]

I agree with Paul and the others: it should be the club that you perceive yourself as joining. This is how it is with my running club: I pay my subs to them, and they give me a membership card. They then pass on £5 to UK Athletics who issue me with a separate "competition licence", the number of which I often have to quote on race entries (to avoid a non-member surcharge). Those who are already members of another club don't pay the £5; I think "social members" don't either.

A similar model could surely work for orienteering: whether a club would bother to issue membership cards could be up to them, there might be little need. I agree with the comments about the problems for clubs collecting subscriptions, but if bodies like Fabian4 etc can collect entry fees on their behalf, why not membership fees as well? I can't see any difference from the data protection point of view.

[SeanC]

Yes, but you really want the BOF system to collect the money and do all the processing. Our membership secretary tells me that the new system has saved him lots of time and effort - and in a small sport with lots of small clubs, IT systems that take workload off volunteers are worth their weight in gold.

Our membership secretary tell me that (ignoring people who are switching clubs) in general people don't renew for two reasons

a) They are too injured to orienteer regularly.
b) They have "too many other things on".

For newcomers it tends to be b), for experienced orienteers more likely to be a).
Of course the newcomers might be being polite.

Not sure what can be done about a)?

I think if a club's slowly growing and adding to the number of socials, events, trips away etc then a high turnover is OK. But if people only have time to orienteer 2 or 3 times a year I would like to keep them in the club as I believe (without any evidence it has to be said) that this is more likely to keep them orienteering thanif they were an IND. At the moment it doesn't make economic sense for these casual orienteers to stay as members after the first year discount wears off - even if BOF discounts are applied at events. I suspect "Too many other things on" sometimes means "Too many other things on to pay £15 to renew my membership"

You might be thinking why am I bothered about such people? It's because (in our club at least) many of these occasional orienteers contribute to the club by going to events, hyping the sport to their friends and family, volunteering at events and even helping us to get grant money and occasonal controlling. Also I think there's a vast mass of people who are willing to orienteer occasionally and (perhaps less than in the past) a much smaller number of orienteering nuts who want to spend every weekend doing O .

[Adrian]

This thread gives the impression that you have to join O clubs through BOF, but my club (and others too, afaik) allows you to join it direct without joining BOF.

[greywolf]

This thread gives the impression that you have to join O clubs through BOF, but my club (and others too, afaik) allows you to join it direct without joining BOF.

How does that work? Unless of course they are "social" members who don't actually orienteer. They can't get the BOF discount, in fact they can't even compete for the club unless they are BOF members (rule 3.2.1 "A competitor shall only compete for the open and / or closed club with which they are registered with British Orienteering" - although to be fair this rule has essentially been abandoned for relays because of the BOF IT fiasco), nor can they Organise, Plan or Control an event (rules 4.1.1/2/3)

If you try to join my local club you are directed to the BOF website and invited to pay £30.50 for a National senior membership...of which the club receives exactly £0

[Adrian]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding our membership page http://www.harlequins.org.uk/membership.html where it says that club membership "may" be combined with LBM or NBM.

Many members are happy to be a club member without competing for it. Competing for a club, you understand, is different from participating in events. Having said that, I thought that regional associations could decide for themselves who is or isn't eligible to take part in regional competitions.

I think it's a bit of a PR trick to call the £2 discount "the BOF discount". Traditionally this discount was applied in the West Midlands to anyone who was a member of a West Midlands club, and I don't think any sanction has been applied to any club which has continued to give the discount on that basis.

[greywolf]

Many members are happy to be a club member without competing for it. Competing for a club, you understand, is different from participating in events. Having said that, I thought that regional associations could decide for themselves who is or isn't eligible to take part in regional competitions.

Not, I think, according to a strict interpretation of the rules as quoted previously (and probably, the insurance policy ) which i take to mean that individuals can't enter events / be listed in the results under a particular club affiliation unless they are BOF members. And definitely can't plan, control etc (Of course non-club/BOF members can participate in events, and many do, especially newcomers and juniors at schools events etc, but they aren't listed as affiliated to a club)

I think your membership page misunderstands the BOF rules!

BTW, not saying I agree with the membership rules as they stand, and in any case BOF has been very selective about which rules it chooses to enforce

[andy]

Make events professionally run, volunteer reliance and therefore burnout isn't condusive to keeping people in the sport.

[Gross]

think it's a bit of a PR trick to call the £2 discount "the BOF discount".

Certainly is as .if I remember correctly, it's not a discount but a surcharge!

[RS]

Do we really want to keep in people who never orienteer, help now and again under duress and swell the club numbers so your club is in the 'big' club category?

[Mrs H]

I'm fairly sure there was an acknowledgement a few years ago that BOF have no power to stop club-only membership - it's up to the clubs whether they offer it. Of course this means that club only members can't represent the club or perform certain jobs, but if these members only come to local events then the surcharge issue doesn't apply either.

We lost a lot of MADO members once their year's free membership of BOF finished - many of them were cross overs from other running/adventure sports and well up to putting on a local event (many of them did before all this happened). They obviously felt they could not justify the expense of paying to join BOF on top of their other sporting commitments. A lot of them still come to the MADO events but as Inds - so we can't ask them to help put on events any more.

[SeanC]

Did you consider making the HOC fees £0 to make the overall cost of staying a member less offputting? I know a few clubs have done this.

[Paul Frost]

I also believe the Harlequins membership page is incorrect and misleading.
I don't think the term "Local Club or Second Club" exists any more and you can't "run for your club in relay events" or "get involved with mapping, event planning and organisation" without BOF membership.

I also agree with the comments about people who only orienteer locally 2-3 times a year, they are useful. They may talk about the sport to friends and may even be happy to help out with things like access permissions (if they have local contacts) and simple jobs like car parking.

All these things add to my argument that making the membership fee very low or free and identified as the club is the way to go. What I didn't make clear was that the "Local/National" mess should be abandoned as it is an added complication and causes bad feelings sometimes.

I acknowledge the issues involved with clubs collecting money in my first post, which is why a free option and PAYG is attractive.

[Mrs H]

Did you consider making the HOC fees £0 to make the overall cost of staying a member less offputting?

I didn't run the whole club - I only ran MADO at the time

[SeanC]

Apologies for the clumsy wording Mrs H.

[Clive Coles]

You are of course quite correct Gross ~ we should by now be showing the £2 as a surcharge, not a discount. That was agreed at ( I thinK ) the 2010 AGM. But BOF have done nothing to make this happen. Indeed, quite the opposite

They have stuck with their decision to head the fee page on their fixture data base with the heading.

Senior National Members (Age 21+) receive a £2 discount at all events and Senior Local Members receive the same discount at events in their Region. Juniors/Students pay the same fee regardless of membership status.

This is fixed text ~ it cannot be overridden by a Fixtures secretary. They could have introduced the change last year when they launched the latest re-write of the system. For reasons best koown to the few this didn't happen.

So clubs have two choices ~ to continue to show full non-BOF member fees on the BOF data base so that the BOF website (when taking into account the discount statement), reads true, or just not to bother to record event fees on the BOF fixture record at all.

Sadly the latter option seems to be the route of choice for many clubs ~ if you want to know the event fees ( or the courses on offer) look at the club web site. The BOF fixtures system, for all it's bells and whistles. no longer holds sufficient data to make it worth reading . What a waste of time and money this has been.

I have been campaigning against this fixed text paragraph from the outset, both during my time as EAOA Fixtures Secretary and more recently as club Fixtures Secretary. I have been arguing that the web design should have the inbuilt flexibility for clubs to be able to structure the fees for their event as they choose. But BOF opted to design the fixtures system to tie it to an earlier Board decision to apply a BOF £2 discount on even the bottom level of event ~ old level 3 current level D events. A daft constraint in my view ~ many clubs have just ignored the BOF directive.

But now even BOF have not taken steps to make their system more flexible so that fees can be expressed as a BOF member rate + a £2 non-member surcharge. The IT project seems to have run out of puff.

What is the point of debating and agreeing an issue at the AGMs if BOF refuse to implement the change on their own systems ?

I give up ~ time to move on.