Event: 29 June 2014
Location: Ilkeston Road Recreation Ground, Ilkeston Rd, Stapleford, Nottinghamshire, NG9 8JL
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This month’s blog comes from Beeston CC’s Treasurer, Sean Murphy, who has the task of making sure the club’s annual Sportive has enough resources and volunteers to make it a success on the day.
The 6 Ps
As you know five years ago we ran a reliability ride for approximately 40 riders, most of whom were club members. The route wasn’t signed, the support and feed station was provided out of the back of a single car and the ride finished in the car park of a local Beeston pub. We now run three fully signed routes with three feed stations and a further one at the start/finish. Riders now register and are given a timing-chip, and our numbers have increased 10 fold to 400 riders!! With this big increase in rider numbers, we have to ensure that our facilities and resources are in place to cope, therefore a great deal of planning takes place as you can see…
Not for profit but…
Beeston Cycling Club runs a number of events other than the sportive (such as cyclo-cross, time trials etc) throughout the year and whilst we do not aim to run them at a profit, we do still need to ensure that they break even. Amongst other rising costs, event insurance and acting upon feedback from the 2013 event, the longest route on the sportive will have an extra feed station.Therefore it is important that we set our budgets to cover our costs. This in turn will indicate how much we need to charge participants. Keeping it as a low-cost club event is getting harder each year!
The additional feed station has a knock-on effect for one of the other feed stations nearer to home, which means we’ll have to keep it open for longer so the decision was made to run it in two shifts. This of course means that we need agreement from the Tramway Museum, whose gateway we use to host the feed station, to extend the hours we can use the site for longer, and that we will have sufficient water and food for all the riders.
There are many more questions which need addressing later in the planning process. Do we have sufficient signs and are they still in good condition? Do we have enough gazebos, water containers, tables, pens for registration? Can we get more bike stands? And the list goes on...
Beeston needs Volunteers!
This would be a big enough challenge for any business but we are doing it in our spare time and with volunteers, therefore finding enough people to volunteer on the day is always tough. As with most cyclists they want to be riding, especially as it’s our own sportive and the routes are so fantastic (shameless plug!). We’ll look at what volunteers we need and how we get them in the next blog.
Organising an event like the Beeston CC members? Visit our organiser info pages here. You can also read Beeston’s previous blogs for here.
