How do you promote target shooting?

[johnfish]

I am a member of a .22 rimfire target club with a great range (indoor and out) looking to get new members. The question is how?!

The media doesn't help when it comes to the image of shooting in general and it's not like you can put an ad in the paper.

So far we have thought of offering it as a skill that can be developed as part of the Duke of Edinburgh award.

Any other sensible ideas would be welcome.

[PaulJC]

At my local there is currently a 12-18 month waiting list, maybe offer other disciplines as well as just target shooting?

[Tone]

In our club 90% of the rimfire shooters started out joining as Airrifle shooters and then branched out into the FAC world with rimfire.

We have no shortage of airrifle shooters who want to join, some go on to get a FAC and some dont.

[Rutty]

I am a member of a .22 rimfire target club with a great range (indoor and out) looking to get new members. The question is how?!

1. Is the club affiliated to the NSRA and does its details appear on the in the NSRA Clubfinder section?

2. Does it have a website, and if so so the site give a clear picture of the club and its activities? There is nothing worse for prospective members than a site that rises their expectations and then the club fails to meet them.

3. Do all enquiries get answered promptly? The response to an enquiry should include a clear statement of what the club does and its policies and clearly indicate what it does not provide, e.g. "We are a competitive sports club and support the following disciplines.., we have no facilities for Field Target shooting". Think about the disciplines that you offer, are they what are popular?

4. The response to any enquiry should included an information pack and an invitation to visit the club by appointment. When an appointment is made you must ensure that there will be someone there who is expecting them and able to show them around and explain the club and its workings.

5. Do you run formal induction courses for all new members? There is a NSRA Probationers Course available that is a good framework for imparting the basic techniques. This should be delivered by qualified instructors and coaches to ensure standardisation. You will find that running courses of about 4 at a time greatly increases retention.

6. You should have at least one club coach available who will look after less experienced members after their initial instruction. You need to retain them.

7. Be careful about over stretching your resources. Juniors in particular require a lot of supervision, you must ensure that it is available.

8. Periodic items in the sports section of the local press serve develop the clubs profile. I have never had any difficulty in getting newsworthy items published. Phone the sports editor and introduce yourself when you first submit an article.

9. Think carefully about what type of member you wish to attract. You need those you can best cater for and are likely to remain in the club. This generally means to older age group. The mantra of recruiting youth is all very well but unfortunately few stick to it, the exception being those who come along with uncle, grandparent or parents who already shoot.

10. Disabled access, if you haven't got it, get it. Grants are available.

11. Avoid one-off recruiting events. Guest days for Scouts, Rotary Clubs, Round Table etc. are OK but full Open Days are very rarely worth the effort.

12. Ensure that you have an entry on your county sports partnership website and are listed by your local authority. A notice about the club and contact details in local sports centres can be useful.

Recruitment is an on going project, members will always come and go so it must become part of the club's normal business.

Finally make sure existing members appreciate that the club needs a steady flow of new faces and it is essential to make them welcome.

If you apply to the club I belong to now, the first course you will be offered is late September. We are in a not particularly well populated rural area not a dense urban region.

Rutty

[Hemmers]

2. Does it have a website, and if so so the site give a clear picture of the club and its activities? There is nothing worse for prospective members than a site that rises their expectations and then the club fails to meet them.

And if you have a website, think carefully about whether you want it to be a simple holding page for information or something more sophisticated with club news. If you have a news section then you are committing to keeping it up to date and finding something to write at least once a month. There are few things worse than browsing a club site and finding the last news article is from 2011. Makes it look unloved and dated - you wouldn't leave a shop window display in place for 4 years with discontinued products and out-of-date pricing, and that's exactly what a website is - your window display onto the world. Every feature or bit of information that you add needs to be maintained by someone.

It's a balance between providing enough information that you don't keep tediously answering the same questions via email, whilst not creating a rod for your back in terms of maintenance. That includes stating what you don't do as well as what you do. After a number of enquiries, I made quite clear on the last site I managed that we didn't do HFT or FT Air Rifle, only NSRA/ISSF 10M Airgun. People could have set up some targets on the narrow outdoor range, but they were far better served by the dedicated FT club a mile down the road, so I linked to their website and directed people there.

At the more sophisticated end, content management systems (not as scary as they sound) like Joomla! and wordpress allow you to have multiple users with different privileges, so you could set up your entire committee and/or trusted members as users, so your Membership Secretary can keep their page up to date, relevant people can add match reports, the Secretary can announce AGMs, etc. None of them need to know how the website works, they just login and create new articles or update pages. That shares the load compared to a webmaster having to manage both structure and content, but mileage may vary from one committee to another as to their willingness to take the time to learn and contribute to it.



On that note, I would also advise keeping information on Club Finders to an absolute minimum - get them to just point to a single point of information that you control, ideally your website, although it could also be a Facebook Page.

Imagine if you have listings on the NSRA and British Shooting club finders, your county association home page, and details have been further scraped by sport-clubs.net, 3rd party club finders like smallborerifle.co.uk, shootingclubdirectory.com, etc, etc. If they're listing detailed information, opening times, membership fees, secretary's phone number, etc then every time even a single piece of information changes it's a nightmare to keep track of them all and get them all up to date.

All you want is a link to your website, which contains as much or as little information as you want, and any information is absolutely up to date and correct, because you only have to update one thing, which you control, and you're not waiting on a 3rd party to update their information.

I also steer away from information regarding opening times and evenings as you get unannounced visitors dropping by, which is a complete pain in the arse when you're just about to go in and shoot because it's your shooting night, not the evening you come down to do admin/range officer/coach/whatever. And the RO can't, because they're RO-ing, and you're the only committee member about *sigh*
Make them phone/email you and queue up a few enquiries so you can show a couple of people round at a mutually convenient and pre-arranged time.

As far as juniors go, nice to have them, but not so much help in running the club. They don't RO, do much on work parties, or run the club.
Also, apart from those coming along with shooting family members (the sport's in the family anyway), they tend to come in lumps. People like to be around other people like them. A 14 year old is not usually going to come to a club full of 50 year olds unless there are some other 14 year olds for them to talk to and be around, or they know those 50 year olds socially anyway, because they've been coming to club barbeques since they could walk!
This is why groups of scouts of whatnot tend to work better than general guest days - because they're already mates and keep each other company.

The corollary to that is if a couple leave the rest will tend to follow and your junior section collapses overnight.
And they need tighter supervision and you need a child protection policy in place, etc, etc.

[johnfish]

Thank you all for your replies. Some very good advice! We have a lot of work to do as the majority of the members are not tech-savvy. It will probably fall on me to create the website and I don't have much time available myself...!

[winchman]

I would offer taster days to scouts D of E etc.
What about a Lads and Dads Day? Mums and daughters etc
Get each memeber to bring a non shooting friend?
I would also suggest some structured lessons for kids , teach them, test them, give a cert badge etc.
Its good you are even asking as some clubs become a closed shop and don't encourage new members but its what all clubs need.
Sell it as an Olympic sport.
Get a local college to ask a student to build the website, organise the catering etc as many of these establishments struggle with placements and yours could be one that stands out and could give them some practical experience with a positive result.
On the other hand you could meet and discuss who has the most expensive gun and bitch about any members who are not present

[Hemmers]

Get a local college to ask a student to build the website

Who's going to maintain it when said student is gone? If you don't have the expertise in the club to start with, getting someone else to build you something you can't look after is problematic...

[winchman]

Who's going to maintain it when said student is gone? If you don't have the expertise in the club to start with, getting someone else to build you something you can't look after is problematic...

That's a good point but the student could build the site and train a couple of members this would look excellent on their CV.
If you have some one who can use word then use something like Serif its quite easy if some one takes the time to show you

[Lord Sut]

It's a shame that you can't put an ad in the paper. When we hide away and keep our activities under wraps we give the impression that we are doing something we shouldn't. I know the reasons for clubs wanting to be low key, but you can't have it both ways.