Orienteering's Public Image

[graeme]

nearly half of the 33-strong Light Green field were 12 & 13 year-olds:

Obviously going backwards here Jon: you had 40 on LG at Darnaway last year and an 11 year old won

[SeanC]

I’m not suggesting that this is the only way to increase participation, and that young juniors & parents are the only possible target group – and I’d be really interested to hear of any non-Uni club that has found ways of significantly increasing M/W21 participation – but the evidence from this part of the world is that promoting the family-friendly, accessible nature of the sport brings results.

SLOW is a good example of a club that has targetted the M/W21 market and increased participation and membership through some good marketing and events suitable for this age group (mainly evening events in London parks and streets with a post-event pub social).

There seems to be a genuine enthusiasm for publicity/marketing, but who's going to do it? Club publicity officers don't get the support that mappers, planners, organisers get ,and many clubs don't even have a publicity officer. The development committee has a long wish list of things that we'd like done to support publicity officers but progress depends on staff getting the time between their many other jobs and there are many more things we'd like than are possible. The BOF marketing officer is part time and can only do so much. The mountain marathon example is a good one - no-one club publicity officer is likely to pick this up and it needs someone co-ordinating and promoting the effort. Maybe one of the participation officers might pick it up, but it would be a bit off their job spec I think.

There have been calls for BOF to cut back in certain areas in order to increase funding on marketing and publicity. I'm sure there's scope for some savings but if significant savings were possible without damaging the other work BOF needs to do I would have thought that these would have been identified by now. Meanwhile SportEngland don't currently give grants for marketing.

You can probably see where I'm going here. The answer lies in your pockets. I guess about 50K would fund a publicity/marketing officer with money left over for conferences, funding innovative club projects, resources with the aim to both support club marketing and improve regional/national marketing. With 5000 orienteers currently ranked that's £10 each. That £10 cost would go down in subsequent years as the marketing brings more orienteers in the sport = more events = less travelling and = improving the sport's economies of scale. Effective marketing at club level helps clubs to think about our events/activities and help make them something more sustainable . Spending money on marketing and publicity may even end up saving us money.

[awk]

What this and other threads highlight every time is that there is no one single marketing answer. There are a variety of market segments, and different clubs will, for all sorts of reasons, be best suited at targeting different segments.

However, the promotion can provide an overall sense of coherence and continuity to that segmentation, and I believe that it should be as that challenging, adventurous sport (whatever the terrain or discipline). Thus, for instance, whilst the video on the BOF website has much to commend it, I cringed massively when I saw the section about how you can walk. To my mind, that is NO way to promote the sport, and is a major trap we've fallen into time after time. Like any other sport, you can take it more slowly when learning, but the sport is about as going as fast as possible, NOT an afternoon stroll.

[Gnitworp]

I cringed massively when I saw the section about how you can walk. To my mind, that is NO way to promote the sport, and is a major trap we've fallen into time after time. Like any other sport, you can take it more slowly when learning, but the sport is about as going as fast as possible, NOT an afternoon stroll.

Quite, Awk. What's the reality. What percentage of competitors actually WALK all the way round their course.

[plain lazy]

I find it amazing no-one has thought of this as a recruiting ground, and continue trying to convince road runners focused on bettering their 10k PB, that running with a map is a better way to spent their time.

I've been speaking to my local running club that I train with, and they are quite keen for me to run an intro evening for one of our training nights... combining an interval session with some basic map skills in the local woods.

Plenty of 10K-ers to try and temp over to the dark (and rough) side

[andypat]

I cringed massively when I saw the section about how you can walk. To my mind, that is NO way to promote the sport, and is a major trap we've fallen into time after time. Like any other sport, you can take it more slowly when learning, but the sport is about as going as fast as possible, NOT an afternoon stroll.

Quite, Awk. What's the reality. What percentage of competitors actually WALK all the way round their course.

Exactly - I dont think its orienteering's role to get fat British folk off their couches just to walk about for a bit - the government can have a go at that. It our role to create an inspirational and exciting and above all competitive sport with aspirational role models at the top level comparable with any sport.

[greywolf]

Quite, Awk. What's the reality. What percentage of competitors actually WALK all the way round their course.

Given that even in our gloriously runnable local forests the "mean" adult performance (i.e. = 1000 ranking points) equates to somewhere around 12 mins / km, maybe there's a significant percentage of adult competitors who would be better off walking....

[Gnitworp]

What percentage of events advertised on the BO website are 'Urban'? Shouldn't the publicity/image bias reflect this very low proportion?

[andypat]

Thats a tricky question since you cant actually search for urban events on the website can you?

[awk]

Quite, Awk. What's the reality. What percentage of competitors actually WALK all the way round their course.

Given that even in our gloriously runnable local forests the "mean" adult performance (i.e. = 1000 ranking points) equates to somewhere around 12 mins / km, maybe there's a significant percentage of adult competitors who would be better off walking....

Very possibly, but it's the aspiration we are promoting, not the reality!

What percentage of events advertised on the BO website are 'Urban'? Shouldn't the publicity/image bias reflect this very low proportion?

It's certainly smaller than 'terrain' based orienteering, but I suspect it's not as small as you might think. I know we're a largely urban club, but of the 50 events we have put on in the past year, a smidgen under half were urban (urban parks, streets etc). Of course, more rural clubs will put on less.
Those urban events, many of which are Level Ds, are also at the forefront of our recruitment.